User Reviews

"End of the Century" is a film that trusts the viewer to keep up with every nervy leap that it takes, and ultimately rewards them in kind.

Writer/director Lucio Castro assuredly constructs the story into three acts, each one existing in a different temporal space from the other. Wandering poet Ocho and more grounded TV producer Javi run into each other on a pedestrianized street in Barcelona, but the pretense of their chance encounter slowly peels away as the film moves through each facet of their unseeable connection. While the pair continues to converse and settle into each other's company, a picture of two diverging paths emerges as both men reflect upon the choices which have fatefully directed their current circumstance. The casualness with which the two men open up to one another builds upon the viewer's expectation that what we are seeing are these two paths moving closer towards the middle, and possibly even merging. However, this expectation is swiftly upended as the story performs a sudden backflip into the past, and then somersaults again into a gossamer space where Ocho and Javi have somehow escaped the factuality of their respective tracks.

The totality of "End of the Century" lands as a piercing rumination over the lives we could have lived but didn't, and the course-defining decisions that we can only really see in the rear-view mirror.

I could talk about how wonderful this film is - languid, sensual, elegiac - but most of all I want to point out to other viewers that the number of beer bottles in the fridge is a clue left by the director as to which parts of the film "really" happened and which are in Ocho's imagination. (Of course, there's no one definitive interpretation with a film like this - your mileage may vary.)

At the start of the film there are 4 beer bottles in the fridge. Alone in the Airbnb apartment, Ocho is bored and takes one out to drink, leaving 3. He spots Javi on the street below, calls him up to the apartment, and they each have a beer before they hook up, leaving just one.

At the very end of the film, we see Ocho alone in the apartment again, and there are 3 bottles - the two that Ocho and Javi drank when they hooked up have mysteriously reappeared, and Ocho is still finishing the original bottle he was drinking by himself at the start of the film.

The middle section of the film, set in 1999, would thus seem to be what "really" happened - and Ocho is reminiscing about it when he returns to Barcelona in 2019 as a newly single man. As he drinks alone on the balcony, first he imagines what would happen if he managed to bump into Javi again now, 20 years on. Then he imagines the future he and Javi could have had if they'd stayed together, a prosaic yet idealized vision of what their lives would be like now. (One can also see the film as showing three possible realities, or believe that everything was real apart from the final 20 minutes, but I think the bottles are a deliberate clue.)

This is how I like to see the film. It's about loneliness (gay male loneliness in particular), missed connections, and the lives we could have lived, for better and worse. It's also an honest, wistful look at gay hookup culture as well as the damage done by the closet and the ever-present fear of HIV. In 1999, both Ocho and Javi are so frightened after their first same-sex encounters that they're physically sick; Ocho is so scared that he may have contracted HIV just from receiving oral sex from a man that he frantically searches the web for information. A lot of us gay guys have felt this death anxiety around sex - whether occasionally or every time we have it - even if we may not like to admit it.

The sex and connection between Ocho and Javi is passionate and sensual when they first meet in 1999. It's still passionate and sensual in the alternate 2019 where they're a couple with a daughter, even if the sex isn't as regular and requires more effort on their part - it's still clear that they love each other and communicate well, and there's a happy mundanity to their relationship. In the 2019 where they just hook up (the opening part of the film), the sex is affectless and mechanical, almost a transaction between strangers, and there's a lack of trust between them. Although they spend the day together, Javi leaves without giving Ocho his number and returns to his husband in Berlin, and Ocho is left alone again.

The acting, direction, cinematography and score are all beautiful. This is a hidden gem.

I have to say that I was getting annoyed when nothing happened for the first ten minutes of this movie but decided to withhold judgment until the end. It turned out, to my mind at least, that it was integral to the plot. Nothing happened.

It's difficult to write about this movie without spoilers, mostly because perhaps nothing is as it seems, though that is not particularly apparent for most of the movie. Looking back, how strange is it that a man should come back to a city where he had a one night drunken adventure and then run into the same guy twenty years later wearing a tee shirt he had bought at the time. And why did he come back to that city, that place.

It got me to thinking about some guys I could have hooked up with and then didn't. Perhaps you go back, thinking that they might be there in the same place, on the next day and of course they almost never are. But then I found myself thinking about the relationship that clicked for me (fifty years ago) and how different my life would be if I had made one stupid move and let him get away.

So I think this a movie, not about the connections that seem to be made in the present but actually about the connection that was missed twenty years ago.

My friends and I watched this movie yesterday and not all of us liked it as it was a little bit confusing. Overall, it is a nice movie despite many of the "faux raccord" especially at the beginning regarding the beard and appearance of Ocho. Was it really three parts regarding the current, the past, and the future? Because my own impression was that the two guys were a couple for 20 years but Ocho faced a problem in memory caused him to forget everything and that's why Javi is trying to remind him of this relation and marriage by returning him back to the place where they first met, wearing the same T-shirt every day and walking under his balcony to grab his attention. Apparently, in the end, he failed to make him remember all of that. If the story is about the three parts as some wrote, then there is no logic in the whole story, nobody forgets his first date, nobody keeps the same t-shirt for 20 years and keep wearing it, nobody when someone calls him from his balcony goes to make s** with him unless he is a wh*** not a married person respects his partner. As I mentioned above, overall the movie is good and Ramon Pujol was very good actually. The worst thing in the movie was the two long sex scenes.

"This film had a profound effect on me" gushed the British Film Institute programmer (albeit reading from a card) as he introduced 'End of the Century' at the 2019 London Film Festival. I am afraid I can not say the same...

The film opens with several shots of Ocho (Juan Barberini) as he walks along a street, looks confused, opens a door, opens another door, looks in a refrigerator, walks on a beach... this may seem to some viewers like setting the slow mood of the piece; to others it will merely seem like padding. Something finally happens when what at first is a casual hook-up with Javi (Ramón Pujol) develops into a tentative friendship, before Javi reveals he and Ocho met and had a drunken coupling twenty years before. That Ocho forgot this is unbelievable for several reasons: a) given both Javi and Ocho were in long-term relationships with women when they first met, it is entirely possible they were each other's first homosexual experience - would a man really forget that?; b) in the twenty-years earlier flashback sequence both men look exactly the same as they do in the present, even to the extent of having the same beards; and c) Pujol is absolutely gorgeous; I refuse to believe anyone who had encountered him would forget it! Subsequent plot developments suggest an explanation for these difficulties - but still further developments open up the questions once again. By which time the viewer may have lost patience at having to put up with so many unanswered questions.

I do not regret watching the film - there is some fairly decent nudity, if nothing else - but overall it seems, as has been noted by other reviewers, rather self-indulgent.

A truly satisfying cinematic experience, End of the Century starts off as an engaging depiction of a holiday hookup between two attractive Spaniards, then takes a major left turn as the characters remain but the circumstances are radically altered.

How the parts of the film fit together will be the subject of many spirited discussions as the final credits roll, and exploring the possibilities is almost as enjoyable as the film itself. Filmgoers who expect pat answers and simple exposition may wind up frustrated, but I found the challenge of unlocking the film's logic exhilarating.

The performances are naturalist and expertly underplayed, while the cinematography is a visual feast that is a source of great delight. I have watched the film several times now and have no doubt that I will revisit it often for its numerous pleasures that cry out for repeated viewings.