Sex and Lucia

Reviewed by PETER CALDER

Herald rating: *

If lustrous, carnally energetic senoritas do, in fact, profess undying love and insatiable lust to novelists they have just met in shadowy Spanish cafes, perhaps I should take up fiction writing and book a flight to Madrid.

That is the premise and starting point of this leering, lubricious and giddily pretentious piece of Iberian lit-porn. But Medem - who made the similarly vacuous Lovers of the Arctic Circle - makes the whole idea seem so ludicrously improbable that I fancy I'll leave the passport in the drawer for now.

The fact that the film's Spanish title is Lucia and Sex may be interesting - it's hard to know. If it were, it would be the only interesting thing about a film which should carry a censor's warning that "content may infuriate".

When first we meet Lucia (Vega) she learns that her lover Lorenzo (Ulloa) is dead. In flashbacks the film fills in the details of their four-year liaison (beginning with the aforementioned cafe encounter) and we learn that she is as desperately neurotic as she is sexually voracious.

So far, so wish-fulfilling. But Medem has his eyes on higher things and unravels - or actually tangles - a mindbendingly complicated series of stories in which past and present are difficult to distinguish and the events in the film merge with those Lorenzo is creating on the word processor.

Lucia travels to a Mediterranean island which played a big part in Lorenzo's past, but by the time the story starts to involve a love child - called Luna because she was conceived on a moonlit beach - a sexy babysitter, her mother, a former porn star (try and keep up, we're nearly there) and a Rottweiler, some viewers at least will be well past caring.

The sole virtue of the film's copious sex scenes is that Medem is inclusively interested in scrutinising male and female bodies, but the whole thing is so relentlessly prurient and muddle-headed it's enough to make real porn - the kind that doesn't bother with plot but cuts straight to the action - look positively attractive.

It's the worst kind of drivel because it fancies it's art.

Cast: Paz Vega, Tristan Ulloa, Najwa Nimri Director: Julio Medem

Running time: 128 mins

Rating: R18

Screening: Rialto