Lucía, Lucía (2003) – DVD

La hija del caníbal
**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C+
starring Cecilia Roth, Carlos Álvarez-Novoa, Kuno Becker, Manuel Blejerman
screenplay by Antonio Serrano, based on the novella Homónima by Rosa Montero
directed by Antonio Serrano

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover A critic at the CHICAGO READER once pointed out that movies often show events that would traumatize us if they happened in real life. But what happens when they cheat and fail to traumatize the characters to which they occur? That's the major problem with Lucía, Lucía (La hija del caníbal), a film that takes a threatened murder and a shocking betrayal and treats them as springboards for a character-building "adventure." In reality, the events swirling around the protagonist would crush her spirit and leave her a broken woman, but in Antonio Serrano's Learning Annex version, everything is a conduit to her self-actualization–a desperately naïve approach that so lowers the stakes of the film that it barely registers.

Tell me this wouldn't leave you shell-shocked: a middle-aged woman Lucía (Cecilia Roth) loses her husband at the airport, and returns home to find a ransom message from a guerrilla outfit called "Worker's Pride." It turns out that the "inheritance" he came into some time earlier was a tad larger than he let on, and when retrieved from a safety deposit box numbers in the hundreds of thousands of pesos–the sum required by said terrorist organization. Not only is her husband a victim, but he's been holding out on her as well, which would shatter any person's world–except, that is, for Lucía's, she being strangely resilient in the face of adversity. Armed with a couple of well-wishers–aged Spanish Civil War vet Félix (Carlos Álvarez-Novoa) and hot young musician Adrián (Kuno Becker)–in her small apartment building, Lucía sets out to find her husband and unravel the tangled mess of lies he left behind.

Were this a farce or an actioner, the lightness of tone would be understandable. But the film keeps asking us to take it seriously even as it discounts the effects of its various revelations, making everything seem slightly ridiculous. Not only does the cuteness of the proceedings gets to be a tad much (Félix is a dependable old codger, Adrián likes to quote famous philosophers and has a crush on Lucía), but Lucía's insistence that the experience is liberating makes you wonder why she's bothering to look for her idiotic husband, the apparent architect of her stultifying normalcy. Furthermore, the persistent Oprah-testimonial tone of the film gentrifies some potentially disturbing revelations about government corruption, upstaging a potential critique with its "personal angle." As it stands, her consciousness is raised only so high–and not high enough to count.

As picture-making, Lucía, Lucía gets by pretty well. No Murnau, Serrano nevertheless keeps the picture moving with agility; he's aided by a cinematographer (Javier Pérez Grobat) with a knack for smooth camera movements and an art director (Brigitte Broch) whose production design is both seamless and clever. But I'd happily sacrifice the movie's technical prowess for a sense of proportion–a true examination of the absent husband's misdeeds would extend far beyond the "life-changing" blather the screenplay insists on spewing. In the end, Lucía doesn't wind up so far away from the bourgeois mindset that apparently held her back. Trapped in a darkened room with her, we don't get so far ourselves. Originally published: July 25, 2003.

THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Lucía, Lucía arrives on DVD as a flipper from Fox. Side A contains the film enhanced for 16×9 displays in its theatrical aspect ratio of 2.31:1, side B in an unmatted variation that reveals Lucía, Lucía's Super35 origins. The opening credits are illegible (someone surely got fired for superimposing black letters against a rockface), but the only thing consistently bothersome about both transfers is the jaggies that result from an overabundance of edge-enhancement. Colours are vibrant and shadow detail is strong, though the source print could be cleaner on the whole. English subtitles are burned-in for a change, and they sometimes vanish amidst white backdrops. The Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 mix is punchy, if less than aggressive, with some nice bass to intensify otherwise ineffectual suspense-pitched moments.

Director Antonio Serrano furnishes the DVD with a feature-length commentary–in English, perhaps to prevent a subtitle overlap; never very insightful, Serrano's thick Mexican accent earns him the benefit of the doubt, as he seems preoccupied with trying to avoid malapropisms. The only additional extra, the Spanish-language "Detrás de Cámaras: The Making of Lucía, Lucía", is divided into two parts separated by the platter break. Part one (11 mins.) finds the actors describing the strange plot in very traditional terms, while part two (15 mins.) digs a little deeper to cover the visuals, specifically the cinematography and production design. Ultimately, you learn that flashy puff-pieces are indigenous to Mexico, too.

108 minutes; R; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced), 1.33:1; Spanish DD 5.1; CC; English (forced), French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-10; Region One; Fox