It is close to
phenomenal how something so structured that, at times, it seems
almost rigid, can be so faithful to what we see as the real life. In
its core, Lucio Castro's debut feature End of the Century,
is a triptych of snapshots of different timelines inhabited by two of
the character. Two of the timelines are real, and one is pure
fantasy.
First we meet Ocho
(Juan Barberini) in the present day (yet, pre-corona, since
the film's release year is 2019) Barcelona. He is a tourist, but
rather a reluctant one: he spends his days walking aimlessly, eating
alone and drinking beer in his Airbnb apartment. He botches his first
attempt at a meet-cute moment with another guy at the beach, but,
when he seas him from the balcony, he invites him to his place. The
man, about Ocho's age, is Javi (Ramon Pujol) and he is a bit
less eager to engage in a relationship or at least a quick hook-up,
which eventually happens... There is a reason for that: Javi is
married and he and his husband have a rule that they never risk the
surge of emotions by sleeping with the same man twice.
Ocho and Javi try to
remain friends, but the truth is that this was not their first
encounter. They had already met 20 years before, when Ocho was a
fresh-of-the-boat Argentinian student and Javi was the boyfriend of
the former's landlord-friend Sonia (Mia Maestro). Until the
end, Castro combines the long stretches of memories from the past
times and the conversations from the nowadays. The fantasy part of
the film is located at the very end, but it tries to cover the whole
two decades of an alternative timeline, in which the two protagonists
ended up as a couple, through one significant moment.
The pretext of the
film suggests it is a gay version of Richard Linklater's
Before trilogy compressed into a single, not even very long
film, but Castro does something completely new here. Sure, there is
some "touristic" value like in Linklater's films, but it is
hardly the focus here. On the contrary, the streets of Barcelona in
both of the timelines are usually devoid of the other people's
presence, and the locations are not being shot in the way that
highlights them. The focus is on the characters and the time and
space between them.
End of the
Century is a film about the passing of time more than it is about
anything else. However, Castro does not employ the ordinary gimmicks
like CGI (de-)ageing of the characters or make-up to create an
impression that two decades have passed. Both of the actors play the
same characters in both timelines that are signalled by the details
casually spoken through the dialogue, stuff like AIDS still being THE
thing and the Millennium Bug panic in one timeline and Airbnb in the
other. Through the dialogue we also get some of the character points,
like Ocho dropping his business administration studies to dedicate
himself to writing poetry and Javi being a young and aspiring
filmmaker before he ends up as a director of kids' shows on
television.
The ageing happens
on the inside and both of the actors are more than capable to channel
it, while remaining faithful to their characters, their temperamental
differences and shifts in their (couple) dynamics. In that part, they
also get a significant help from Castro's screenplay, since the
filmmaker quite realistically envisions them as the type of men who
seem more mature than the average in their 20s, but also quite
youthful in their 40s.
The rules of the
game called life change over time and Castro manages to tell a highly
original story about that. Formally rigorous and carefully thought
of, End of the Century is a smart and sure-handed feature
debut by the director who managed to keep the soul of his previous
works in shorts.
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