This week we sought to understand ways in which escaping fascism and reinventing religiosity lead to new ways to imagine sex, love, and kinship, and how Spain’s cinema of the last decade of the 20th century represented such new ways.
During the last decade of the 20th century spectators inside and beyond the borders of Spain saw new ways to experiment with film and to represent the memories and survival strategies of fascism. After a century of constrained and wildly repressed and resisted ways to figure sex, gender, love, and the family, filmmakers like Coixet straddled transnational borders outside of the Peninsula. Other filmmakers straddled these borders inside Spain, navigating histories of repression of regions where citizens did not identify as Spanish (Catalunya, Galicia, the Basque Country, Valencia, Andalucía), where they did not speak Spanish as their mother tongue, and where human beings were simply different. On Monday we discussed what Pavlovic calls ‘contemporary trends,’ such as violence, the Gaze, graphic representation of sex and sexualities, fantasy, horror, and others. On Wednesday our discussion focused on the fourth film of one of the leading ‘foreign’ filmmakers inside peninsular borders (if not Castilian), Julio Medem (Tierra / Earth; Vacas / Cows; La ardilla roja / Red Squirrel; Room in Rome; Ma Ma), whose Basque trilogy was followed by cinematic experiments such as the fin-de-siecle film Amantes del círculo polar / Lovers of the Arctic Circle (1998) and our movie of the week, Lucía y el sexo / Sex and Lucía (2001).
Please, post your comment on the question of how escaping fascism, reinventing religiosity, and rewriting love and kinship are represented by Medem in Sex and Lucía. Try to post by Saturday at 5pm.
The film Sex and Lucia represents a radical departure from fascist ideologies and conventions. It does this less so from looking forward so much as looking back. While that may sound decidedly not radical, it most definitely is when we observe what the film is looking back on. While the actual plot of the film isn’t exactly revolutionary per se, the symbolism within the film most definitely is. The visual references (or even the references in the names of the characters, such as Luna) recall Bunuel’s Andalusian Dog, a surrealist film with a left leaning slant. Bunuel’s surrealist film juxtaposes itself to many of the pro fascist films that came out after it, many of which were very much straightforward in conveying its fascist agenda. This deliberate recalling of Bunuel and the past is radical in the sense that it recalls a time before right wing fascism. The way that the story of Sex and Lucia is told is also somewhat radical. While the plot of the film is somewhat simple, the non-linear way in which it is told also evokes the difficult to understand nature of surrealist works, albeit in a very different way. This too recalls Bunuel and a period before fascism.
It should be noted however, that the way the female characters are portrayed in this film is not in direct contrast to fascism. The film, while containing many female characters, still seems to be very much adhering to old norms with the male character at the center of everything. This somewhat betrays the radical tendencies found elsewhere in the film.
Sex and Lucia reflects the great escape from fascism’s repression and strict societal expectations. The hypersexuality, independent women, and taboo relationships express the desire to be free from the sexual and social confinements of fascism. Although Sex and Lucia is modern in its representation of sex, Medem incorporates many familiar traditional elements of Spanish films like his emphasis on the eyes, gaze, and sense of being watched. Also, although religion is not directly addressed, there is a hint of the mystical or divine in Medem’s symbolic use of the sun and moon, and in the miraculous fate that leads these people to all be together in one place. Additionally, despite Lucia’s relatively masculine independence, she and the other women in the film are still clearly represented from a male perspective. The entire film is strongly rooted in the male gaze, which is not unfitting given the context of Lorenzo’s intense fantasies, but I think this should still be open to criticism for idealizing and misrepresenting women as objects for male interest or sexual attraction.
Where Alex de Iglesia’s Day of the Beast loudly protested corruption and complacency in the Spanish clergy, Medem’s Sex and Lucía is a bombastic and unabashed expression of sexual liberation in a post-fascist Spain. Like I have commented in previous discussions, Spanish film from the post-Francoist era appears to over-correct for decades of stifled expression and artistic production under the fascist state. Where previous filmmakers such as Berlanga and Erice were forced to employ subtlety in their critiques of totalitarianism, Medem and de Iglesia spare no expense in the creation of anti-fascist films. Although not explicitly about Francoist Spain, such as del Torro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, Sex and Lucía is laden with anti-fascist themes and iconography. Most obviously, Sex and Lucía has no shortage of sex; quite literally in its frequent depiction of the nude female and male bodies; a portrayal of people which would be deemed blasphemous under Spain’s previous honor code. In addition, Medem’s film reject classical conventions of Hollywood and Spanish cinema, foregoing standardized elements of mise-en-scène and camera work for more modern, rugged approaches. Medem’s film embraces the digital format; including an abundance of over and under-exposed shots which make the new medium noticed. Like the later discussed films in the Spanish catalogue, Sex and Lucía makes every attempt to be a work that is the polar opposite of fascism in Spain.
Madem’s expressions of escaping fascism come in multiple forms. There is the escape that the characters themselves face. Some feel trapped by their existence or pushed out of their lives and so they seek the island as a form of physical escape from tragedy. There is also the escape from sexual or gendered norms in the expression of each character. All of them speak about and engage in sex openly and expressively, but there is also a shift in the gender expressions of many of the characters. Lucia and Elena are both very masculine, refusing to cry and running from their troubles with stubborn heads, while Lorenzo and Pepe are more quiet and withdrawn, aside from Lorenzo’s outbursts, which feel much like a stereotypical jealous girlfriend’s reactions, he is in his own head for much of the film, not only in his fantasy, but he is very self-conscious about his writing as well. In the scope of form, there is an escape of linear narrative story-telling, the timelines are not specifically delineated, and the ending is left with many questions. As it is referred to in the film, there is a hole at the ending that lets you rewrite the story if you wish. This can be read as a desire to escape into fantasy or reconstructed history, but I think that it is beyond that. The questions of reconstruction or allowing a narrative to hold conflicting endings and multiple paths could convey the confusion and apprehension of people trying to contend with a difficult past. In the narrative of the movie there is the death of Luna and the possible death of Belen and her mother, but on a grander scale there is also the questions the viewers might face about their own past histories, the stories that they have lived through or have been told. Perhaps it is like giving permission to have conflict in your past or to reframe it if you wish.