End of the Century, review: a love story that’s almost too beautiful to describe

Dir: Lucio Castro. Cast: Juan Barberini, Ramón Pujol, Mía Maestro. 18 cert, 84 mins

Summon a memory, as visual as possible, from 20 years ago. Imagine it side-by-side with a documentary record of whatever that moment was. And consider the differences: has it been idealised, and how, and why? Has it changed in reflection over time? Does it mean something different now?

Two strangers, in the Argentinian love story End of the Century, meet twice by happenstance across that time period – a gap long enough that at least one of them is oblivious to the fact that they’ve met before. The workings of memory in the film are distinctly slippery; details feel askew. It’s set in 2019, then 1999. Why do these two men look exactly the same age – the actors, Juan Barberini and Ramón Pujol, are both around 40 – both times?

It’s a mystery – not soluble straightaway – but the film has an answer that’s more to do with fantasy than fact. Over its tantalising 84 minutes, it disappears into quite a reverie – a fugue state of weighing up what might have been. Not until the end are we sure what the reality of these encounters was. And even then, are we, quite? This perfect wisp of a narrative – elusive, but curiously profound – conjures half a lifetime as half a mirage.

At the start, Ocho (Barberini) – a struggling dark-eyed poet from New York, with a dull job to make ends meet – arrives in Barcelona on holiday and lets himself into a rented flat. Restlessly, he scans the streets from his balcony, and scrolls through the gay hook-up app Grindr to no avail. He has a near-miss when cruising on a beach, when some other guy packs up and leaves their spot. But later – wearing a KISS T-shirt – the same fellow strolls past on the street below, and Ocho beckons him up.

This is Javi (Pujol), a cheery ginger Spaniard who works in children’s TV. They have sex, filmed with matter-of-fact intensity, and swap numbers. In the way of these things, it could just be what it was, but they eke out another date from it, and find out bits and pieces about each other’s lives. On a rooftop, at sunset, the film stops them in mid-flow with the epiphany that history has somehow repeated itself.

In 1999, in the same city, where we suddenly are again, they have very different lives – even if they haven’t de-aged one jot. Javi has a girlfriend called Sonia (Mía Maestro), who’s also Ocho’s old friend. Neither man seems to be openly gay, because we are further back in both time and tolerance. Ocho’s trip on this occasion is a feverish blur – he falls ill from probable food poisoning, though later admits his (unfounded) terror that this might have been a sign of HIV.

Javi, at a loose end, gently nurses him to health. And they have one night, when Sonia’s out of town, getting red-wine-and-tequila drunk as the sun goes down. In the film’s giddy, almost inexplicably poignant centrepiece, they dance jauntily around Javi’s living room to the synth-pop classic I Ran, by A Flock of Seagulls – a more or less sure-fire way of securing the film a permanent place in my affections. It’s a beautiful kick of one-night-only euphoria – not purely because it’s between two gay men coming to terms with their identities, but this is undeniably a part of it. And for Javi, who will soon exit his relationship, it’s a watershed moment.

From here, everything in End of the Century is a wistful comet tail, a trailing of the particular scent of that holiday and moment. The film is like finding one of Proust’s madeleines tucked inside a short story by Borges, where it keeps vanishing and reappearing.

Just one film into a hopefully durable career, the writer-director Lucio Castro has made a glinting jewel of an existential romance, whose more linear twin might be Andrew Haigh’s Weekend, 2011’s Nottingham-set two-hander. The intangible melancholy of both films, about brief encounters with a lonely city as their backdrop, is immensely – paradoxically – hard to shake.