"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.
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.