Most films have one beginning. This one has two, and you can start from either.

SEX AND LUCIA, the 2001 film from Spanish director Julio Medem, was built to be entered from both ends of its own story and to arrive, either way, in the same place.

A waitress in Madrid gets a phone call telling her that her boyfriend, a struggling novelist, has died. She runs, all the way to a sun-bleached Mediterranean island where he once spent a summer. The film follows her there, and then it stops moving in a straight line.

The story arrives in fragments scattered across six years, and Medem keeps a private rule: a character who reaches one of the island's sunlit holes can fall backward through time and surface in a different version of events. The past here is not closed. It can be re-entered, rewritten, and survived a second time.

The reason it can do this is that Lorenzo, the dead man, was a writer, and we are partly inside the novel he built from his own life. Fiction and memory bleed together until you stop sorting them, which is the point.

Paz Vega became a star on this film. It is sensual, sad, and far smarter than its reputation as an erotic drama suggests.