Madrid. Teenager Lulu is infatuated by Pablo, a Professor and the friend of her brother Marcelo. Lulu and Pablo go to a concert, and afterwards go to his home and have sex. Pablo goes to the United States, but returns and then marries Lulu. They get a daughter. Lulu is interested in spotting tranvestites, and she and Pablo become friends with transgender prostitute Ely. Pablo persuades Lulu to a have a threesome and blindfolds her, but she is so angry when she finds out the third partner is her brother that she leaves Pablo and takes their daughter with her. Lulu is fascinated by watching gay men have sex on video, and then hires three to participate live. Lulu contacts pimp Remy to work for him, but is tied up in his underground sadomasochist night club and raped while two men paid to watch it, yet Pablo calls the police who save Lulu and arrest Remy's henchmen.
Bigas Luna's early work, erotic drama "The Ages of Lulu" works better in its first half, when it is focused on normal sexuality, than in its second, weaker half, proving that sexual violence generally doesn't work in Luna's movies. It's not quite clear what the story wants to be since it starts out as a teenage drama about the title heroine falling in love with an older man, Pablo, and loses her virginity with him, and then follows their marriage, yet in the last third this all falls apart when weird incest and sadomasochist themes are introduced which wreck the initial concept. In the opening act, Luna doesn't waste time and jumps fast to his erotic territory when Pablo has Lulu seated on a green armchair and shaves her pubic hair, after which they move to a sofa and have sex. Afterwards, Pablo tells her: "Sex and love are two different things. What happened tonight was love." In another sequence, Pablo embraces Lulu while she comments on using a vibrator for the first time: "It's weird, it's got nothing to do with a man. It's cold... And I must move it myself..." This segment is good because it has a certain sense for both their passion and infatuation, since they are such a good couple. But when Pablo blindfolds Lulu and has a threesome which includes her brother (!), this incest insertion is a major tonal shift which causes the movie to slip from its right tracks. Afterwards, the movie is not sure where it is going, as if it lost its thread, and thus fills out the remained of its running time with a pointless rape sequence in a S&M night club involving gay men: among them Luna's future actor Javier Bardem, with whom he would film the excellent "Golden Balls" three years later.
Grade:++
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