a film by Julio Medem
Lucía is a young waitress in a restaurant in the centre of Madrid. After the loss of her long-time boyfriend, a writer, she seeks refuge on a quiet, secluded Mediterranean island. There, bathed in an atmosphere of fresh air and dazzling sun, Lucía begins to discover the dark corners of her past relationship, as if they were forbidden passages of a novel which the author now, from afar, allows her to read.
The film opens with Lucía at work, talking on the phone with her depressed boyfriend Lorenzo. Worried, she goes home to console him and finding an empty apartment, Lucía frantically searches for him. She then receives a phone call from the police and finds a suicide note, but she is so afraid of the bad news that she hangs up, assuming the worst has happened to Lorenzo. Looking for a new beginning, Lucía decides to travel to the mysterious Balearic Islands that Lorenzo had always talked about.
The story shifts to six years before, when Lorenzo and a woman named Elena, without even knowing each other's name, have a magnificent sexual encounter in the ocean one night under a full moon. They part ways, expecting never to see each other again but Elena conceives his child and gives birth to a daughter who is raised without a father.
Lorenzo talks with Pepe, his literary agent at a restaurant, discussing his writer's block. Lucía catches his attention as he gets up from his table. She tells him that ever since she read his latest novel, she has been following him and has fallen desperately in love with him. A very surprised yet smitten Lorenzo immediately engages the beautiful, passionate Lucía and they begin their relationship, living together in Lorenzo's apartment.
The film then continues interweaving past and present, people in real life and the characters in Lorenzo's novel. In the past, we see Lorenzo repeatedly stalling for time on his new book with his editor while his relationship with Lucía deepens. Lorenzo learns from Pepe that he has a daughter as a result of his encounter with Elena and begins to visit the child at her school while meeting her babysitter, Belén. Lorenzo uses his new encounters as content for his book. Belén flirts with Lorenzo and invites him over to Elena's house while she babysits the daughter, Luna. Lorenzo tells Luna a bedtime story, and after she falls asleep, he and Belén begin to make love. They are interrupted as Luna knocks at the bedroom door, and they watch in horror as the family's dog attacks and kills the child. Lorenzo runs away and falls into a deep depression. As he writes about his new experiences with Belén, Lucía reads it, believing it to be fiction.
In the present, Lucía meets a scuba diver on the island, Carlos, and through him, Elena, who runs a guest house there whilst trying to come to terms with the grief of losing her daughter. Elena invites Lucía to rent a room at the guest house. As the past is gradually revealed, each has to cope with its devastating significance in the present and understand the entanglements of their interwoven relationships.
Featuring a circular narrative with repeated visual metaphors, it is a complex, passionate and beautiful love story, told in the style of magical realism. Revolving around the hidden connections within relationships, the film explores the interplay of reality and imagination, cause and effect, and how our past and present lives unknowingly intersect.
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