Lucio Castro’s first film is an explicit romance in which the lovers look the same across two decades. It’s not The Irishman, he says, and he prefers it that way
All Lucio Castro had in mind when he sat down to write a screenplay was an elegiac title – End of the Century – and a starting point: a figure arrives in a new city, in this case Barcelona. “I followed him around for a while as I wrote,” Castro says. “I thought, he’s new to the place and maybe he’s horny and he meets someone and they have sex and go for a drink and that’s when they realise they’ve met before.”
So begins a plangent gay love story with hints of Andrew Haigh’s Weekend and Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy. The dominant mood, however, is elliptical and disorienting: a kind of Last Shag at Marienbad. “There should be something a bit off about the film,” explains the 44-year-old Argentinian director. “I want the audience to doubt what it sees.”