After Lucia (Spanish: Después de Lucía), 2012.
Directed by Michel Franco.
Starring Tessa Ía González Norvind, Gonzalo Vega Sisto, Tamara Yazbek Bernal, Hernán Mendoza, Paloma Cervantes and Juan Carlos Barranco.
SYNOPSIS:
After the tragic death of his wife, a father and his daughter move to Mexico City looking for a fresh start only to find that starting over can be complicated when so much has been left behind.
For around the first 45 minutes of After Lucia, the film is a quiet, straightforward examination of a father and daughter dealing with the after-effects of his wife/her mother Lucia’s death in a car accident. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’ll continue this way to the end – the film is tenderly titled ‘After Lucia’, after all. The father starts getting his life in order, daughter Alejandra (Ale) finds a welcoming group of friends at her new school; Ale even finds a potential new love, culminating in a drunken fumble at a pool party. Then the film reveals itself, and the relentless onslaught of misery begins.
After the video of Ale’s intoxicated tryst circulates around the school, the pupils turn on her. Before long, a school-wide orgy of systematic bullying is taking place: Other boys film themselves flashing Ale in the girl’s toilets, jealous former girlfriends cut Ale’s hair off, her class force feed her a birthday cake made of an unknown, wretched substance, before a school trip to the beach sees Ale pissed on, raped and almost drowned in the sea. Director Michel Franco just stops caring about the mother halfway through, and looks instead to putting his fragile lead through physical and psychological torture.
Maybe the intention was to increase the audience shock all along, in which case the surprise narrative gear-shift is a smart move on Franco’s part. It’s undoubtedly a memorable film, but with a farcical climax, Franco’s saving grace is that some people may agree with his message. He appears to be claiming that, in the age of internet and mobile phone, bullying can arise due to a numbing of real human connection. He also seems to think that mob mentality within teenagers will encourage even the meekest of youngsters to join in on torture and rape parties.
It’s difficult to like After Lucia if your world-view isn’t so bleak. With the unflinching cruelty and the unappetising lo-fi look, it’s like Franco was punishing me, only I wasn’t sure what I’d done to deserve it. It’s a similar feeling to one you might take from Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, except that that film was explicitly set within a film reality, rather than our own. It was a clear fiction, making the obviously extreme elements more palatable.
After Lucia, on the other hand – gravely serious about its intentions – is quite obviously set within our world, owing to its near documentarian’s realism. This means the fact that all After Lucia’s teen characters are outwardly likeable but within secretly all amoral psychopaths, that Ale becomes so passive as to do anything her tormentors tell her, or that Ale’s father does what he does in the final act (I won’t spoil it) becomes laughable. It’s hard-hitting, but incredible.
The realism of the performances (which, it must be said, are all very convincing) only renders the scenario more unrecognisable in its wildly contrasted unrealism. The worst thing about the film is not that it’s intentionally, single-mindedly repugnant, but that it is completely unbelievable for the entirety of its last act. So much so that, at one point during the screening I was at, it encouraged the quiet man on my row to throw up his hands, in both despair and disbelief. It’s the best review anyone could’ve given this film.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Brogan Morris – Lover of film, writer of words, pretentious beyond belief. Thinks Scorsese and Kubrick are the kings of cinema, but PT Anderson and David Fincher are the young princes. Follow Brogan on Twitter if you can take shameless self-promotion.
Originally published November 15, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
