End of the Century (2019) is an inventive, gentle, Spanish queer love story that I would likely not have particularly strong feelings about – if not for one minor character, who is so wonderfully vibrant and alive that she throws the whole movie out of whack. But first, let’s establish the basics:
Our main characters, thirty-something Ocho and Javi, meet in Barcelona, and at first it looks like the movie is going to be a Before Sunrise-esqe ramble through their weekend romance (Javi is married and has a child; Ocho is only in town for a short time). But then, midway through, we leap back twenty years to the men’s actual first meeting, where they have a brief, boozy connection, full of sexual and romantic promise. Then we’re back to the present, where the movie has one more temporal twist: After the men part ways for a second time, Ocho imagines what it would have been like if they had gotten together after that first meeting; if they were living an alternative present in which they were now a long-term couple with a child. It’s an imaginative way to portray that urge we all have sometimes – to break out of the relentless linearity of time, double back, do it all differently – and one that is especially resonant for queer people, who often waste years hiding who they are, waiting for the chance to be themselves.
Too bad, then, that the first two sections don’t give this imagined stretch the emotional oomph it needs to be truly tragic or moving. The characters, despite having detailed discussions about Big Life Things (hopes, dreams, past relationships, number of kids wanted) never quite emerge as fully developed people. Ocho is somewhat broody and at some point has a change of heart about having kids. Javi is more playful and once tried to make a documentary. Beyond that, I never got a real sense of who these characters were, outside of their chance encounters with each other; what drove them through life, what drove them together. But still, this might have been a perfectly lovely, if somewhat emotionally malnourished, movie of lost romance – if not for Sonia.
Sonia is a minor character, though also the only character with any real screen time besides the two leads. We meet her in the twenty-years-ago section, where she is dating Javi and hosting Ocho for his first Barcelona vacation. In her first and only real dialogue-substantive scene, she tells Ocho about a past breakup: how she woke up in her hotel room surrounded by the things her ex-boyfriend left behind, and then jumped into the fetid hotel pool, reasoning that if she survived the jump, she could survive the break up – only to get a UTI days later from said fetid pool. It’s just one scene, but it does for Sonia’s character what many, many conversations between Ocho and Javi never could for theirs: it makes her a real person. A specific person, romantic, impulsive, self-aware. The sort of person who lives her life in a series of dramatic set pieces and then tells her friends with charming self-deprecation afterwards.
Of course, I knew, even then, how her story was supposed to function. She was there as a thematic echo, her breakup presaging the heart-ache that, for Ocho and Javi, was still to come. A subsequent scene of her singing opera is not even nominally about her – it just there to add some musical texture to Ocho’s story. I knew all of this but I didn’t care. Already her story was bigger, truer, and more vivid than Ocho’s or Javi’s. (Credit must also be given to the actress, Mia Maestro, who manages to convey all of this nuance in what is, again, mere moments of screen time).
Imagine my devastation then, when, after arriving back in the present, Javi reveals that Sonia has died in the intervening years. Not just died: hit by a garbage truck while walking to a singing engagement. A garbage truck! Now, let this not stand as a general condemnation of off-screen deaths, silly or otherwise: when a character has been properly developed, killing them unceremoniously can be an effective, realistic gut punch (see: Moonlight; Pandemic) – but not here. Here, Sonia, despite that one great scene, was never given her own story, so her death only functions in the context of the men’s lives. It’s just a metaphor – for the brutal passage of time, for the people you lose along the way, for the lost love of the central pair. It’s a device and a cheap one. (It is perhaps also illustrative of how queer men and women in media seem to always jostle for narrative room, pushing each other out of the limelight, using each other for their own narrative ends – a point reinforced by the off-hand revelation that Sonia provided the egg that produced Javi’s daughter).
But then, as I was still chafing from Sonia’s death and how lightly our leads move past it, the film comes to that final, imagined stretch. Ocho wanders the streets of Barcelona with he and Javi’s (imagined) child strapped to his chest. He turns a corner and there she is: Sonia, alive, singing opera alone in a beautiful courtyard, a hat full of coins in front of her. Ocho and his daughter stop to listen. He tosses a coin into her hat. It is a beautiful scene, that initially seems to function within a sort of dream-logic (why else would Sonia, established as a well-respected opera singer, be singing on the street?) until a conversation between Ocho and Javi reveals that she has been forbidden from practicing in her apartment and now enjoys “playing homeless.” It’s a perfect detail – so in keeping with what we know about Sonia’s character, her flair for both the dramatic and the irreverent.
But watching this scene and thinking about it afterward, I wanted to resist the beauty of it. I wanted to be angry that Sonia, who was killed for cheap emotional resonance, was now being brought back for even more cheap emotional resonance. I wanted to be angry that the movie felt like the flimsy central romance should be equated with a woman’s entire existence – especially when the movie had previously treated that existence as something of a punchline.. And most of all, I wanted to be angry the Sonia we got in this section, even with her perfect lovely details, was not really Sonia but just Ocho’s projection of her: as a minor, but charitably resurrected, figure in the grand story of his and Javi’s romance.
But I couldn’t stay mad. The scene is too beautiful for me to be mad at; it hits too hard. If this essay is anything, let it be a testament to the unwieldiness and subjectivity of art – the way viewers can take home meanings that artists never intended, the way certain characters can break out of their scripted roles, become inconveniently alive. Years from now, when I have forgotten everything about Ocho and Javi, forgotten even the title of this movie, I will remember Sonia. I will remember her, miraculously resurrected, singing in the courtyard. I will remember how, if I could talk to her, she might have told me the story of her death. How she was late for her singing engagement, how she bustled out of the house, bedecked in a gown, in a nice fur coat, hurried and self-important, only to be hit by a garbage truck. “A garbage truck!” she’d emphasize, alive to the ridiculousness of it: “That’s how it ended for me, a garbage truck.” Then she laughs, gestures to the beautiful streets of Barcelona, this imagined world that no longer belongs to Ocho, whom I have forgotten, but to her: “But then – this! I woke up to this!” She turns back to me, conspiratorial, as if this isn’t something she tells everyone who asks: “Almost makes the garbage truck worth it, doesn’t it?”
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