I’m getting closer to the coast and realize how much I hate arriving at a destination. Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom. — David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives
The passage from Wojnarowicz’s “memoir of disintegration”—inscribed onscreen two-thirds of the way through END OF THE CENTURY, the remarkable debut by writer and director Lucio Castro—suggests a directive for both the film’s characters and its audience as we parse distinctions between imagination and reality, dream reunions and deathless regret.
Marked by a fluidity that sets the present against a non-objective past, the film is a mysterious evocation of a passionate fling and its possible reminiscence—Ocho (Juan Barberini) and Javi (Ramón Pujol), both traveling for work, meet as strangers in Barcelona… but what happens next? Javi’s “Kiss” T-shirt—which functions, in a Lacanian sense, not unlike the small blue box in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive—may offer a clue.
END OF THE CENTURY / FIN DE SIGLO (2019, Argentina)—co-starring Mía Maestro as Sonia—won Best Film at the Buenos Aires Film Festival and Best First Film at Frameline in San Francisco.
Join the director for opening weekend Q & A’s at the Nuart. (See link below for details.)
Now playing.
LUCIO CASTRO Q & A
Friday and Saturday, September 20 and 21, at 7:30 pm.
Nuart Theatre
11272 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles.
Lucio Castro, Fin de siglo / End of the Century, from top: Juan Barberini (foreground) and Ramón Pujol; Barberini (2); Barberini (left) and Pujol; Barberini (2). Images courtesy and © the filmmaker, the actors, the Cinema Guild, and Cinema Tropical.
