A triptych of snapshots, two real and one possibly imagined, from the lives of two gay men, writer-director Lucio Castro’s End of the Century is at its most intense, and sexiest, when it’s also at its most unknowable. More precisely, up to the moment that one of these men, Ocho (Juan Barberini), remains unknown to himself, withering in uncertainty, Castro’s feature-length directorial debut is a profound and casually artful expression of the lengths to which people go in order to not have to embody their desires.
The film begins at a literal remove from Ocho, capturing the fortyish man as he walks through the octagonal streets of Barcelona. By day, he drinks in the city, and by night, he checks Grindr before jacking off. Right away there’s a hint of José Luis Guerín’s In the City of Sylvia in both Castro’s blocking of the handsome and scruffy Ocho and the ineffable weight that emerges from the way he looks at the world, as if the man were willing it to look back at him.
And yet, unlike the tormented artist at the center of Guerín’s film, Ocho is a sensualist who seems resistant to emotional nourishment. That isn’t immediately understood, and isn’t obvious from Ocho’s botched meet-cute with the adorable Javi (Ramon Pujol) at a local beach—a scene that ends with Javi curiously annoyed and Ocho frustrated by his own lack of follow-through. But they get a second chance, after Ocho catches a glimpse of Javi on the street and invites him up to his apartment—and after small talk pregnant with desire, the men have sex with a passion that doesn’t faze Ocho but seems to leave Javi haunted.
Javi’s look would seem to contain multitudes, an impression that’s confirmed after he and Ocho reunite that evening, drinking and eating on the rooftop of Ocho’s building and alternately speaking about their lives. Ocho, who’s Argentinian, is visiting from New York, on the rebound after a 20-year relationship that came to an unexpected end, and Javi is married to another man and living in Berlin. There are multiple worlds between them. And yet, there’s an ease to the way they present themselves to each other that feels very much like the initial stirrings of love. It’s something that Ocho seems to sense, and is possibly why he tells Javi that it feels as if they’ve met before. To which Javi responds, “We have met before.”
If this moment is as discombobulating to Ocho as it is to us, we’ll never know, as Castro radically cuts from the scene before any emotion can register on the man’s face. It’s here that End of the Century seemingly reboots itself, capturing Ocho going through the same motions as he went through at the start of the film, walking through the streets of Barcelona before arriving at the apartment of a friend, Sonia (Mía Maestro). And it’s here, sitting across Ocho and through words filled with quiet anguish, that Sonia speaks of her life in ways that come, like so many other moments in the film, to reverberate with Ocho and Javi’s rooftop musings.
Who is this version of Ocho who’s now with a woman? Who is Sonia’s ex, Eli, and was he really in love with Ocho at one point? And who exactly is this woman who talks, and sometimes sings, of her heartache as if she knows that it might kill her? The film doesn’t answer these and seemingly countless other questions, delighting in our uncertainty over its mysteries until suddenly it all seems to fall into place when Ocho meets Sonia’s boyfriend: Javi. End of the Century’s masterstroke isn’t so much this reveal—which is impossible to expect, given that Castro puts no effort into making Barberini look 20 years younger—but how the filmmaker tasks the viewer with stitching together the story of two men’s lives from how their conversations echo each other across a vast expanse of time.
Castro has a gift for elision. The Ocho of old, who pukes after receiving a blowjob from a stranger, is a long way from the Ocho of new, who doesn’t bat an eye when Javi asks him if he has a condom and Ocho responds, “I’m on PrEP.” But if Ocho’s response to his ostensibly first sexual encounter with a man registers as shame, it’s understood to be something else entirely as soon as he pulls David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration from Sonia’s bookshelf. A bit too on the nose, perhaps, but there’s a quiet beauty to the moment where Javi finds the book, after Ocho has left him for the first time, and opens to a bookmarked page. In this moment, he understands Ocho through Wojnarowicz’s words and, suddenly, we comprehend why Javi appears so tormented throughout the film’s first section.
The story of so many gay men’s coming out is similar, so it’s perhaps inevitable that Ocho and Javi’s conversations about who they are and who they want to be not only mirrors Wojnarowicz’s writing, but also Andrew Haigh’s Weekend. The nonlinear quality of End of the Century, then, could be seen as Castro’s way of putting some distance between Haigh’s film and his own, which similarly resides in a realm somewhere between fantasy and reality.
But if Weekend progressively inches toward the real, End of the Century embraces only fantasy in the end, offering up in its final section a vision of what Ocho and Javi’s lives may have been like if Ocho hadn’t at one point in time pledged allegiance to Wojnarowicz’s pursuit of “perpetual freedom.” It’s a jarring endnote to an initially mysterious film, as the philosophical inquisitiveness of the first two parts is replaced by an indulgence of fiction as wish-fulfillment. (It would be understatement to say that the moment doesn’t hold a candle to the allegorical plunge of Tropical Malady’s second half, where the desire of two men for each other is elevated to the level of myth but without it losing its present-tense veracity.) Whether or not we’ve been dropped into a projection of Ocho’s imagination is almost beside the point, as End of the Century leaves us with the not-so-ambiguous impression that Castro believes that a gay man’s contentment is only possible through the performance of domesticity.
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