Fin de siècle

How would your life be different if you took a different relationship path? That's what gets explored in this poignant film.

The director and cinematographer use long, beautiful (and mostly silent) visual narratives to create a sense of isolation for the main character who has recently ended a 20 year relationship.

Using flashback/flashforward scenes, the film explores what happens when two men meet again after a hook up that took place 20 years prior.

It is an outrage that two people of the same sex can get married and yet cannot buy this film. The UK censor has given it an 18 certificate. There is no criminality in this film, no drug abuse and simulated sex where no genitalia is visible. To me the simulation cannot be termed real sex and there is nothing in this film that would not pass for a 15 if it was aimed at a heterosexual audience. It is discrimination pure and simple. Now for the film. I watched it twice and the first time I found it tiresome. I was not keen on the actors who did not engage me, and I found that the beauty of the film visually got in the way of the characters. At that point I thought this is a 4 or 5 at most. The second time light dawned and I saw the subtle references to past, present and the tragedy of human alienation more clearly. The actors look ordinary, deliver the dialogue in an ordinary way and walk around a city ( Barcelona here ) in the way any of us would do. The fact that they look more or less the same despite 20 years difference was no problem. Even on a banal level some of us age slowly and do look more or less the same. The real revelation to me was how much this film resembles Antonioni's great film ' L'Eclisse '. Nearly 70 years ago this masterpiece with Alain Delon and Monica Vitti was the culmination of modernity and a shuffling off of the two world wars and the dread of another. Please viewers who know this film watch the ending and see the fire in a corner of the screen. Post Modern now we wait for another century and another 70 years of who knows what change and destruction. The two characters walk through memory and forgetting, just as Vitti and Delon did and as in ' L'Eclisse ' there is a wild dance in the middle which to me shows defiance as well as pleasure. Also watch out for the David Wojnarowicz book ' Close To The Knives ' ( Aids themed; defiantly so ) and the fears of one of the characters. No this is not a boring film, perhaps a little too fussily aesthetic for my taste, but a film that shows stages of History and our own history within it. The film cries out to be watched multiple times and if it has faults and most films have, then concentrate on the eternal situation of alienation and how we adjust to loss and renewal.

While the film never quite reaches the emotional peaks that its romance subgenre may imply, Lucio Castro's 'End of the Century' is a sexy, beautiful, and contemplative tale of a love affair that lingers in the mind.

In my humble discernment, the key to making sense of this movie and of its many twists and turns of time and the many ambiguities of the story lines, is that much of the story happens in Ocho's imagination.. If we assume the long, plodding initial scenes depicting Ocho's arrival in Barcelona are real, of his reacting to solitude and loneliness by listlessly wandering the streets, staring vacantly at nothing in particular, until he notices Javi in the plaza below and then later at the beach. At that point the story picks up and grows increasingly intricate and complicated. The ambiguity of the story, however, questions how much of the story actually happened and how much is just Ocho's imagination, just a continuation of his introspective mind through the preceding opening scenes up to that point. How much of the story is actual history and how much is fantasy? It's no surprise that Ocho's and Javi's appearance didn't change during 20 years, if in fact 20 years never went by except in Ocho's mind. Whether the details of the story are real or fantasized, this film tells a true story of the odyssey of a heart as a lonely hunter in quest of a loving human connection. A beautiful film.

Do you think a one-night stand can become the kind of true love we all need to build a life together, even start your own family? That is what "End of The Century" (probably) is about. We are here faced with a bizzarre, interesting and brave narrative choice - the film maker introduces us to the two main characters by some sort of imbalance between past, present and future. The challenge is certainly bold, the viewer has to keep up with the continuous timeline change, but this is what makes the movie intriguing and appreciable. The idea is to turn the emerging love story of these two guys into a whole path of life, made with fading memories of what it was, uncertainties of what it will be, and a brisk concreteness of contemporary living. The two characters are well-defined, their lives converge and diverge during these different story arcs, and the whole plot can be considered cute, simple but wacky. Notwithstanding the appearance and facial features of the two guys seem not so suffer from the flowing of time (at all), we find an average result in our hands - a movie that is nice, unpretentious, genuine and quite pleasant to watch.