After Lucia

With 'After Lucia' reigning in the good reviews after it's run at Cannes and Chicago and with some beautiful stills online I was sure that both the script and the look of the film would please me. I wasn't necessarily wrong. However, if you're looking for one of those optimistic Studio Canal stories, this most certainly is not one of them.

'After Lucia' is a perfect example of when sometimes, a script is better because of what is not said, rather than what is. It is a strong bearer of the 'silence speaks louder than words' philosophy that a lot of indies take on. It does it with precision, with perfection. We are almost driven mad by silence, as I am sure main character Alejandra is too. We are left alone with our thoughts, our wishes, our anguish... as she is. In this case, silence disconcerted the audience into a feeling of unease and uncertainty. Scenes often go from being subtle and symbolic to quite volatile in seconds. 

For example, the very first shot of the film is shot from a single angle in the back of a car and lasts a good five minutes. We see a man (who we later find out is Alejandra's father and the husband of the late Lucia) as he gets back into the car that killed her once again. We watch him drive for minutes that seem so long we wonder if the shot will ever change at all. Then abruptly he stops in the middle of the road, gets out and walks. Subtle to volatile, example 1. He is clearly a broken man. The silence beautifully left it to a willing audience to decipher the meaning of this act. It was later revealed that without wife Lucia he just does not seem complete. 

The film is mainly based upon the character of Alejandra, the daughter who has taken on her mother's role of cooking and cleaning and has recently moved to a new city with her father. Here she is forced to make new friends, which at first seemed easy for her. Until one night at a party when she has a bit too much to drink and ends up in a dark bathroom fumbling around with a boy she likes on camera...only she is not the only one who likes him. 

In the weeks that follow, the jealous girls that once were her friends circulate teh video, tease her and call her a 'slut'.

They cut her hair, they make her eat cake made from shaving cream or toothpaste or something similarly undesirable. We are screaming for it to stop. For her to go wild and kill them all.

What a dilemma. For a child to care so much about her father who is struggling to find his feet in his new restaurant without his beloved wife, that she holds back telling him of her pain. It's painful to watch as she suffers in silence. Almost too painful.

The final straw for both the audience and Lucia is when all students are told that they must attend a school trip. Of course Lucia is inevitably placed with girls that dislike her. She follows their every command in fear of dealing with the consequences if she doesn't. She goes to change in the toilet where the girls lock her in. 
Not for seconds, 
nor for minutes 
but for hours. 

Here the director's choice to film from one singular angle, truly allows us to grab a hold of time. It seems to stop. It seems she is in there forever. Ignored and insignificant. Still shown from the same angle, her undesirable roommates throw a party and others (who also used to be her friends) even enter the bathroom to urinate and then willingly pull the cupboard back to barricade her in. Then came the thing that saw even my boyfriend rise in anger (he is usually relatively calm during films). After all this, when we were pleading with Alejandra to go mental and kick back... the fat kid whom we have learned to hate during her torment enters the bathroom. With Alejandra curled up trying to sleep in the shower we are made to watch as he unzips his trousers, slides back the shower door and (although we don't see it) rapes her as she struggles and tries to kick out. 

The next shot we see is him doing his flies back up and pushing the cupboard back over the door. Here comes some tremendous character direction in such a simple shot. I remember being drawn to him, watching his face to see if he regretted it. He was proud of it. He was laughing. She is completely alone. She has nothing left. No fight, no dignity, no hope. It was horrible to watch, even if we didn't graphically see what happened. We knew. We knew that that was it for her. She didn't care anymore. This was the point for me that the whole film seemed to mirror it's single-scene volatility. And it continued...

The kids then go to the beach at night where they drink and two of the boys think it's funny to urinate on her by the bonfire. By this point I was beyond noticing the skill of the cinematographer and was simply aching with feeling for this poor broken young girl. They all decide to go swimming because it will seem weird if Alejandra is the only one that comes back soaking wet and smelling of urine. They go into the choppy sea and Alejandra vanishes out of sight. They think she was dragged out to sea. As an audience we are not quite sure either. I didn't know what was better. For her to allow herself to be dragged out to sea or to face more suffering. At this point I realised I had been clenching my boyfriends hand for at least 20mins. 

We then watch as the father is informed of the sex video of his daughter. Another singular static shock as the father sits watching his laptop.                          We watch as he tries to do

everything normal to find his daughter and when that reaps no rewards, he snaps. Out of pure torment and desperation he kidnaps the boy who filmed the video and bundles him into his car. He refuses to talk to him as the boy pleads to go back to his parents. Her father stays silent still. We watch as he then bundles the boy into a boat and drives out to sea. Still silent as the boy cries and pleads that he is sorry and that he wants his parents. With his mouth gagged and arms bound Alejandra's father finally stops the boat. We are not sure what we want him to do.

By this time we have seen that Alejandra is in fact alive. She travelled back to her old house and is tucking in to some snacks on her old bed and curls up to sleep, no longer caring about anything or anyone. 

We return to the boat, where the father stands up, picks up the boy, still whimpering in the otherwise hauntingly silent scene and throws him into the sea before starting the motor and driving away. We are left shocked. To see that this man has gone so far, out of pure desperation and unbearable loss, is traumatising even for us. We want him to be punished, but we are left wanting. Just as Alejandra was.

We want everything to be ok. We want him to find her, or her to find him. We are left pleading this is not the end... the film ends. Her father does not know that she is alive at all. Although, after her experiences, how alive is she really? She is a shell of her former self. 

As the credits rolled both me and Kamal outburst in frustration at the fact no-one helped her and that there was no happy ending. I tell you what, if this film was used in an 'anti-bullying' lesson in secondary schools, no child would ever dare to humiliate another human that way. Not if they reacted the same way we did. We were aghast. I was even more aghast that it was not the fat boy who had raped her that died. I wanted him to suffer. And that is extremely out of character for me. I almost understood Alejandra's Father's mindset as I too was raging at the fact that no-one seemed to be helping. I too wanted him to take matters into his own hands. A tremendous script, not necessarily of words, conquered the morality within me that I hold so highly. The 'Sound of Silence' was truly the focal point of this icy success. 

'After Lucia' left me feeling extremely angry. I was frustrated with the injustice of Alejandra's treatment, at the unfinished story and at the inability I had to change the outcome. The lingering camera shots meant that every facial murmur was picked up and this truly added to the beauty of such a heart-breaking and demoralising film. The sound design was perfect. We waited for that outcry that never came, for that emotive music that will somehow redeem the horrible silence we were witnessing during those harrowing moments we wanted to run into the screen and stop. It seems that the film achieved every reaction from me it set out to achieve and that is testament to some great casting, some minimal camera shots that forced us to focus on the characters, some extremely emotive eyes and a thoroughly personality-thawing production. 

And I thought that Anna's fate in Downton was as bad as it could get this year?!