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Better Late Then Never

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

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.

Wasn't this supposed to be the summer of only dumb sequels for teenagers? So what a surprise that we have a virtual trilogy of intelligent foreign films about women of a certain age with strong, sexy imaginations and time on their hands to meet up with unexpected strangers, in "Swimming Pool" then "Friday Night (Vendredi Soir)" and now "Lucia, Lucia (La Hija del canibal)." "Lucia" is unexpectedly the funniest of the three, a delightfully wry black comedy with twists on expectations that the storyteller turns on herself constantly as she bonds in an odd three-some with her neighbors, an elderly ex-revolutionary and a young hunk. While based on a novel, it seems like a gender/generational response to the Mexican teen-age road movie "Y Tu Mama Tambien," in the classic tradition of women's response songs to hits (as in "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels"), complete with a country line dance scene as a relaxing break from political intrigue and marital secrets exposed while Lucia searches for her kidnapped husband -- and herself. One of the running jokes is how the older generations can still surprise the young 'uns.

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.

Antonio Serrano has to be commended in bringing this film to the screen. Unfortunately, the finished product leaves a lot to be desired. The script based on Rosa Montero's novel, The Daughter of the Cannibal, turns out to be an enigma with a lot of questions not being answered.Cecilia Roth makes this film comes alive. She is the only thing going for this strange tale of deceit that, at times, doesn't make a lot of sense. Ms Roth is the only excuse for seeing this uneven movie.The underlying theme is how greed affects innocent people. Also, how Lucia's marriage of more than ten years has been a sham. Ramon, her missing husband, obviously, can't perform in the sack. Cecilia is a very unfulfilled woman until the 'hunky' Felix comes into the picture and is able to get some life out this woman. Felix awakes feelings within Lucia she didn'n know she had, but alas, it's too late for her to undergo another relationship, with Felix, or anyone else.This film kept reminding this viewer of another, and better Mexican film, "Y tu mama tambien", in that there's is a trio embarked in a quest along the Mexican highways. Lucia, Lucia, never achieves the magic of that other picture, but it's a very nice effort, which keeps the viewer hoping it will get there as well.