Film review

  • End of the Century

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Fin de siglo

    Lucio Castro (2019)

    A man who looks to be in his late thirties arrives in Barcelona.  He goes to the Airbnb apartment he’s renting there.  He seems sad as he opens the fridge in the apartment kitchen, which contains just a few basic supplies, and, later that day, as he eats and drinks alone at an outdoor café.  Looking down from the apartment balcony on his first night in Barcelona, he notices another man, roughly the same age as him, walking in the courtyard; when he goes to an otherwise deserted beach the following morning, he sees the man again.  Both swim in the sea, though without speaking to each other.  Back in the apartment, the tourist returns to his balcony, catches sight of the other man a third time, and now calls out ‘Kiss’.  This is the word emblazoned on the latter’s T-shirt and the first word spoken in End of the Century, about fifteen minutes into the film (which runs only eighty-four minutes all told).  Not long afterwards, the two men are having sex together.  Chatting over drinks that evening, the visitor to Barcelona admits to a strange feeling he’s met his companion before.   The other man has a simple explanation:  they were briefly lovers, in the same city, twenty years ago.

    That was at the end of the twentieth century – a time when, as revealed in flashbacks to the first affair, neither Ocho (Juan Barberini) nor Javi (Ramon Pujol) was comfortable with his sexuality.  They got to know each other through a mutual friend, Sonia (Mía Maestro).  Ocho, an Argentine on a backpacking holiday in Europe, was spending a few days at Sonia’s apartment; Javi was her boyfriend.   In the intervening decades, Ocho has become a poet and set up home in New York.  He’s had a longstanding relationship with another man, which has just ended, at least for the time being.  Although a Barcelona native, Javi is also now a visitor in the city.  He has a husband and daughter in Berlin, where he works in children’s television, and is back in Spain to see his parents.  His marriage, as he tells Ocho, is an open one.  The flashbacks reveal other major changes in the protagonists’ lives and attitudes, beyond coming out as gay, since their first meeting.  In those days, Ocho, who grew up as an only child, was eager to have a family.  Javi was an aspiring film-maker, planning a documentary about the dawn of the new millennium.  He was also sure that he didn’t want to be a father.

    Once the Argentine writer-director Lucio Castro, whose debut feature this is, has described the two men’s first liaison, Ocho’s failure instantly to recognise Javi becomes hard to credit.  (The look on Javi’s face after the encounter on the beach suggests that he does immediately recognise Ocho.)  One’s natural reaction is to feel that these intense early interactions, which took place at a time when both men were at least partly in denial of their sexual orientation, would be powerfully memorable.  There’s a further confusing element:  other than Javi’s different haircuts in the two parts of the story, his and Ocho’s appearance is virtually unchanged in the course of twenty years.  They look considerably older than the late teenagers/early twentysomethings they’re meant to be in 1999.  In the present-day story, the relationship between Ocho and Javi is again short-lived.  Javi is clear that his extra-marital affairs can go only so far.  He’s also firmly committed to his young daughter.  At the end of the film, Ocho is alone again in the Airbnb apartment.  Meanwhile, though, Castro has inserted sequences through which the mystery of the plot thickens.  In these scenes, not only are Ocho and Javi living together in what appears to be a settled relationship; they also have a child.

    The surface narrative of End of the Century may be increasingly puzzling but this adds substance to Castro’s main theme – a theme that T S Eliot-oriented viewers (like me) might think of as ‘What might have been and what has been/Point to one end, which is always present’.  Except for Ocho’s remark, in one of the couple’s last conversations, that ‘I hardly remember anything’, the script doesn’t allude explicitly to the uncertainty of memory – but it gradually infuses End of the Century, along with a strong sense of the synergy between memory and longing.  After he has watched, from his balcony, Javi walk away for the last time, Ocho returns to the kitchen and opens the fridge.  Its contents are just as they were when he first arrived there.  Castro seems to suggest in this moment that it’s possible everything we’ve seen in the meantime – or at least since Ocho first caught sight of the young man in the ‘Kiss’ shirt – was what might have been, taking place only inside the solitary tourist’s head.

    Seen in this context, the unchanging age of the actors makes fine expressive sense.  When Pedro Almodóvar was working on his adaptation of a trio of Alice Munro short stories, comprising a continuous narrative that covered a period of forty years, he at first planned to shoot the film in North America and cast Meryl Streep, and Meryl Streep only, as the heroine Juliet.  He didn’t (as I understand it) intend to try to make Streep look the ‘right’ age throughout.  None of this came to fruition, chiefly because Almodóvar was uncomfortable about writing and directing in English; the eventual result, Julieta (2016), had two main actresses, playing younger and older versions of the title character.  What Lucio Castro does in End of the Century is essentially akin to what Almodóvar first thought of doing.  By having the same actors, in their late thirties, play the main characters as forty-year-olds and twenty-year-olds, Castro reinforces the inaccessibility – except through memory – of the characters’ younger selves to the people they’ve aged into.  To quote Burnt Norton again, ‘all is always now’.

    I was taken with this film from the start.   When Ocho first enters the Airbnb apartment, the sound of the front door closing behind him isn’t loud but is resonant:  it’s the sound of arrival in strange surroundings when you’re on your own, when the noises of a new place register sharply, unmodified by the sound of other human voices.   The sequences on the beach and in the sea seem to show Ocho, perhaps Javi too, engaging in a beguiling courtship ritual.  The first sexual intercourse between the pair is graphic and extended.  In the sense that it doesn’t convey much about each man’s personality, the sex here is arguably protracted and voyeuristic – even though its initial impact is strong, thanks to Ocho’s solitariness in the preceding scenes.  Elsewhere, Juan Barberini and Ramon Pujol build characterisations that are eloquent and individual.  These physically contrasting actors are consistently excellent.

    As Sonia, Mía Maestro, a well-known singer-songwriter in Argentina, has a beautiful and distinctive voice.  Other than Sonia’s singing and the background Hi-NRG music that paves the way for Ocho and Javi’s first bonk in 1999, the soundtrack is sans score until the shots of an unpeopled Barcelona that end the film.  (These are accompanied by original music from Robert Lombardom which also plays during the closing credits.)  When he talks to Ocho about the documentary he’s going to make, Javi describes his fear of the impending millennium.  Among its several virtues, Lucio Castro’s film is a skilful, supple illustration of how it’s become easier to live an openly gay life in the course of the two decades since.  It’s not Castro’s fault that, in plenty of other respects, the world in the year 2000 is beginning to feel like paradise lost.

    27 February 2020

  • Gerry

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Gus Van Sant (2002)

    In an opening sequence that lasts several minutes the camera follows a car travelling along a mostly deserted road.  Only one other vehicle appears, in addition to a couple of horses in a roadside field.  The camera moves for a relatively short time in front of the car to reveal the two young men inside it – Casey Affleck driving, Matt Damon in the passenger seat – before resuming its previous point of view.   The car eventually stops and the men get out.  As they start walking along a track marked ‘Wilderness Trail’, they exchange greetings with a group of hikers approaching from the opposite direction.  From this point on and until its closing sequence, Gerry is a two-hander.

    Written by Gus Van Sant and the actors, the film has two essential inspirations.  The plot derives from real-life events:  in 1999, best friends David Coughlin and Raffi Kodikian got lost while hiking in Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico; for Coughlin, the consequences were fatal.  In terms of film-making style, Gerry is indebted particularly to Béla Tarr, renowned for his existential themes and extraordinarily long takes.  I didn’t get far with the only Tarr film I’ve attempted – his latest, The Turin Horse (2011) – and I doubt I’d have got much out of Gerry with, say, the younger Leonardo DiCaprio and Matthew McConaughey in the title role(s).  In the company of Casey Affleck and Matt Damon, however, the grim journey is thoroughly engaging.  Flawless naturalistic acting means that neither Affleck nor Damon seems to be performing yet they’re always, unobtrusively building their characters’ increasing desperation.  They also make the most of occasional opportunities to raise a laugh.

    Both young men are called Gerry, which sounds gimmicky but doesn’t turn out that way, not least because the dialogue is pretty sparse.  (The word ‘gerry’ features in the script as a noun as well as a vocative.  It’s a synonym for cock-up that Damon and the Affleck brothers, according to Van Sant, were in the habit of using long before the film was made.)  Embarking on their hike without food or drink, a compass or a map, the Gerrys lose their way almost immediately.  On their first night, they build a camp fire and are still light-hearted.  Things go from bad to worse during the following day as they wander through the wilderness.  After splitting up for a while, they rejoin each other, retrace their steps and follow animal tracks.  Every attempt to get their bearings is fruitless.  The pair are increasingly tetchy with each other, then silent, as they enter desert terrain.

    On the face of it, the Gerrys’ complete unpreparedness is unlikely enough to make you wonder if the story is primarily symbolic – if their plight is meant to demonstrate the wages of man’s hubris, the ultimate futility of human endeavour, that kind of thing[1].  The film’s landscape (the actual shooting locations included Death Valley, the Utah salt flats and somewhere in Argentina) is certainly enough to bear this interpretation.  It’s a third major character and the most powerful presence in Gerry.  The DP Harris Savides is, along with the director and his two actors, a fourth major contributor to the piece.  Savides’s images give the story the quality of an existential parable and, at the same time, intense physical reality.

    The landscape, both dynamic and impassive, would be easier to take if the viewer, along with the protagonists, wasn’t trapped in it.  The effect is compelling, though:  the series of prolonged takes during which the camera’s lack of movement exerts a fascination includes an episode when the Affleck Gerry is stranded on a high rock.  He has no option but to – eventually – jump down, his fall broken by the ‘dirt mattress’ prepared by the Damon Gerry.  It’s as if the camera’s spell is briefly broken too.  When Damon asks if Affleck is OK, the latter’s laconic ‘Yeah’ is unaccountably funny.  The physical contrasts between the actors and the temperamental differences of their characters are absorbing too.  Damon’s is the more phlegmatic, amenable to suggestions from the relatively wilful Affleck.   (Damon was just turned thirty and Affleck in his mid-twenties when the film was made.)

    I didn’t know beforehand either about the real-life events that inspired Gerry or how it turned out.  That helped put me in a frame of mind analogous to the Gerrys’:  I assumed, like them, they’d escape their terrible predicament until the point came when I realised, as they do, that that seemed impossible.  In the desert, the dialogue dries up as much through despair as through fatigue.  There’s really nothing more to say – until they both collapse, exhausted and dehydrated, and Affleck Gerry murmurs, ‘I’m leaving now’, reaching weakly towards his friend.

    Damon rolls on top of Affleck, strangles him and passes out again.  After a while, he comes to and sees a shimmering in the distance – not a mirage this time but actual cars on the highway.  He gets up and stumbles towards them.  In the closing shots of Gerry, Van Sant returns to a travelling car.  As before, Damon is a passenger.  The driver is now a man who, with his young son, appears to have rescued him.  In contrast to the film’s opening sequence, which is accompanied by Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, there’s no music on the soundtrack for this return journey.  And words continue to fail the sole surviving Gerry.

    22 February 2020

    [1] The Wikipedia account of the Coughlin-Kodikian incident – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_David_Coughlin – suggests that, although these two were ill equipped for their camping exhibition, they weren’t quite so short of vital supplies as the Gerrys are:  ‘Kodikian and Coughlin had only brought three pints … of water and one pint … of Gatorade.  One pint of water was used to boil hot dogs during their first evening in the canyon.  Although they had a topographical map, neither knew how to properly read it’.

     

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