nycritic LUCIA, LUCIA is another of several stories involving unreliable narrators as the lead character, telling a story that suddenly takes a left turn in plausibility and makes you, the viewer, question everything that you've seen and wonder if 1.) the director was too lazy to construct a believable story with incursions into the clever or the surreal, or 2.) the director, and his screenwriter, have tapped into the essence of turning a story and its genre inside out, ending with a product that is pure genius.Much in the tradition of Francois Ozon's SWIMMING POOL and UNDER THE SAND, and David Lynch's LOST HIGHWAY, Antonio Serrano has created a movie about a woman, Lucia, whose husband Ramon disappears in the middle of a busy airport and thus misses her flight. However, because she's introduced herself as an unreliable narrator, she's spelled out the trickery that follows soon after when the real meat of the plot takes hold (which is soon enough, LUCIA, LUCIA doesn't take much time to get there).See, her husband is nowhere to be found. Almost immediately following suit, her neighbor, an elderly man named Felix, and later on a young stud named Adrian, come to her aid. The three become fast friends and are on the way to find what has happened to Ramon. What they eventually realize is that other parties are also in hot pursuit, and that Ramon may have been a part of a much darker plot that puts her in constant danger.LUCIA, LUCIA has a lot of visual style going for it. The way Lucia as a character begins telling her story, makes up her mind and changes appearance suggests that there is always something a little more to what's being shown. It might be a chore, however, for a viewer not too keen on these constant left turns that the story takes, and it might not be long before some form of exasperation settles in. Even so, it's an entertaining view that doesn't demand too many questions and has that final telling zoom-in of a picture that answers quite a bit of questions as to the character's identities.Cecilia Roth's performance is on cue as the older woman caught in a situation that threatens to barrel out of control at any moment. She's given great support by Carlos Alvarez-Novoa as Felix, Kuno Becker as the stud-muffin Adrian, and Margarita Isabel as her mother. Jose Elias Moreno has a small part as Ramon.

George Parker "Lucia, Lucia" is a Mexican comedy/light-drama about a forty something married woman who takes up with an older man and a younger man to go in search of her kidnapped husband. What follows is, by all accounts, an unsatisfying tale of the hapless trio sorting through the foibles and mischief of Mexican bad guys, cops, and some underground movement. As a comedy/mystery story, this film stumbles around awkwardly. However, as a showcase for the beautiful title character (Roth), the film works very well. Those who expect a story may be disappointed whereas those who expect a light hearted character study of a woman in midlife working her relationships with two men may be amply rewarded. Recommended for more mature audiences into Latin flicks. (Those who enjoy this film may want to check out "Solas", a Spanish film which is also about a woman in trouble who, like Lucia, takes up with a Carlos Álvarez-Novoa character). (B-)

JCEFalconi I avoided seeing this movie for a long time, simply because I was tired of being let down by bad mexican cinema. After seeing the huge marketing campaign behind it and noticing that it had the same director/writer of Sexo, Pudor Y Lagrimas, I decided to give it a shot. Big mistake, this is a mess of a movie, the plot, the dialogue, the paper thin characters. Not one of the elements that made Sexo, Pudor Y lagrimas translated, the only thing that remained were the preachy monologues and overall pretentiousness.

jdesando Writers are driving me crazy: In `Adaptation' Nicolas Cage was barely sane struggling with his inspiration and incendiary companions, true or otherwise; in `Swimming Pool,' Charlotte Rampling created a plausible fiction of a dangerous female border and Rampling's desire to make real the murders she wrote.Antonio Serrano's `Lucia, Lucia' is set in Mexico with a children's writer, Lucia (Cecilia Roth from Almodovar's `All about My Mother'), admitting in voiceover her fictions about her life, establishing herself as an unreliable narrator about the kidnapping of her husband, her attempts to recover him, an affair with a younger man, and a friendship with an older man. Initially I was put off by her lies because a mystery needs a reliable narrator, but as I accepted her creative effort to describe the middle-aged crisis through these fictions, I settled into an aesthetic trance that sees clearly the symbolism of each character relating to her changes of life. Her observation that heaven must be a moment of sex frozen in time is one of the interesting insights these varied experiences brought to her.Involved in the kidnapping is a rebel gang patterned after the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) prominent about 30 years ago in Mexico. This plot to deliver the ransom money to the gang is so complicated that even the playful plots of `Y Tu mama Tambien' and `Amores Perros' seem simple by contrast. The inclusion of a corrupt government in the kidnapping is confusing and certainly adds no allegorical insight given the historically corrupt governments of Mexico.The Spanish version of this film is called `The Cannibal's Daughter,' a much more daring and figuratively descriptive title for Lucia's consuming life. Actually, her actor father once played a cannibal and mother sees marriage as sharing life with the living dead. It's easy to see why Lucia questions her marriage and warily enters into relationships with the passionate young man and politically-romantic older man. At the least in her story, she is experiencing what the bard predicted when he said of middle age: `Thou hast nor youth, nor age, But as it were an after-dinner's sleep Dreaming on both.'In the end, the story turns nicely on the evolution of a soul who accepts life and her place in it as a writer whose imagination helps her find peace. The men may lose her, but she finds herself.