Lucía (Paz Vega) is beside herself after getting a disturbing call. She abandons everything and goes to Balearic Islands. Six years ago, her boyfriend Lorenzo gets the married Elena pregnant in an one-night stand. He's struggling to write and meets Lucía at a café. She moves into his place. Then Lorenzo learns about his daughter and gets involved with her babysitter Belén.

This movie has two overwhelming aspects. The nudity is very explicit and the story is very confusing. I'm not offended by the nudity but maybe some people are. I'm more concerned about the confusing mix of past, present and the imaginary novel story. I don't think I'm an idiot but this blender-mix of real and unreal leaves me lost. I don't think it's even suppose to make sense at all. It's a jigsaw puzzle with no solution. In the end, it's all made up and non-sensible. It's a beautiful, erotic jumbo.

In Madrid of the present days, the waitress Lucia (Paz Vega) leaves her job and goes to her apartment to meet her mate Lorenzo (Tristian Ulloa),who seems to be very depressed. When she arrives, she receives bad news about Lorenzo from the police. She moves alone to an isolated island, where she meets a stranger and lodges in a pension where he is living for the last months. The story shifts to six years ago, when Lorenzo and a woman, without knowing even the name of each other, have a magnificent sexual intercourse. The woman gets pregnant, and her daughter is raised with out a father. Meanwhile, Lorenzo is a writer that lost his creation skills and one night meets Lucia in a restaurant. She confesses to him that she is in love with him and has been stalking him for a long time. They fall in love for each other and Lucia moves to his apartment. Later, Lorenzo is informed by his friend Pepe (Javier Cámara) that he has a daughter, and he meets her in a square, with her baby sitter. From this point on, Lorenzo mixes his reveries with reality.

"Lucia y el Sexo" is a weird movie, with a style that resembles David Lynch. I am not sure whether this was the intention of the director Julio Medem, or whether his screenplay is indeed only confused. There are too much gratuitous sex scenes and exposure of genitals, inclusive of penises, and although Paz Vega is a delicious woman, I do not like this type of appellative exaggeration in a film. The story has good points, does not have clichés, and has many metaphoric scenes. I understand that the title of this movie mainly refer to periods of time, "Lucia" in the present days, sharing her life with Lorenzo, and "Sex" the consequences of his intercourse with an unknown woman six years ago. In the end, I found "Lucia y el Sexo" an excessively erotic film, with a confused screenplay, but also very intriguing. I intend to see this movie again in a near future and reevaluate it, trying to see if it becomes clearer after a second time. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Lucia e o Sexo" ("Lucia and the Sex")

I can't remember seeing many movies that were more beautifully shot than this one. It doesn't hit you over the head like one of David Lean's colossal spectacular stupendous architectiptoptoloftical magnificences but it is quietly effective. Faded when it needs to be, dark and moody when required. It's not just the pretty setting. The interiors are as well done as the undulating sea grass. And the performances are equally accomplished.

The plot, though. Well -- the plot. It's as if the people behind the movie had gorged themselves on Finnegans Wake and Borges to the point of bursting and then had sat down and storyboarded the whole movie on a major binge. (And I thought only the French could outfox me.)

There are some notions -- I hesitate to call them "themes" -- that run through the movie. There is the sea, of course, and the island, and the moon ("Luna"),and sex, telling stories, and conception and birth, and reproduction. I'm being kind of loose with some of those definitions so that "reproduction", for instance, includes writing novels, as does "telling stories" to children.

I'm on kind of shaky ground with most of those ideas so let's stick to sex, which I more or less understand. There's all sorts of hetero- and autosexual stuff in it, maybe even a hint of bestiality, but you get used to it. I went through the Human Sexuality Training Program at Berkeley along with a couple of hundred other professional types, many of them elderly ladies. The first thing the organizers did was have everyone sit down in an amphitheater and watch one full hour of pornographic movies, homosexuals at work, old folks, elephants. Satiated, the participants were no longer shockable and were ready to deal frankly with sex. This movie has a similar effect. One erect penis may be worth a gasp but by the time the second rolls around you're wondering what it has to do with the plot.

And, I'm sorry but I still can't get over the plot. This guy Lorenzo is evidently trying to write a novel, see, and this girl, Paz Vega, a total stranger, approaches him in a bar and suggests they live together. And at the end they ARE living happily together. It's everything in between that stumps me.

I could ask a dozen questions about the plot but will just give one example. What happened to the little girl, Luna? I could make as good a guess as anyone else but it would still be just that, a guess. Anyway, I won't list them all because you'll be asking yourselves the same questions after you see this film.

Not that I want to bash it. As I said, the actors are uniformly good. I especially liked the novelist, Lorenzo, who has a face that is sympatico without being the least bit handsome. And it's a movie for grownups, which nowadays is a novelty. There isn't the slightest nod to raw adolescent sensibilities. Phrases pop up from time to time that raise those little flags you see when you've marked an email message in your inbox as worthy of more attention. "A lighthouse without a keeper."

The plot may be a lot more murky than the Mediterranean Sea in this film but I sat through it all with interest, waiting to see how or if they could pull it all together.