There’s a tenderness to Lucio Castro’s debut film, “End of the Century,” that feels too fragile to be sustained. One imagines that a wrong touch could break it. The idea of a brief romance with life-altering consequences is central to the very best of cinema. And yet, even as cursory observations might project the shadow of a “Brief Encounter” or “Before Sunrise” on to Castro’s delicate romance, “End of the Century” is unabashedly its own thing – hazy and gentle, but still lacerating and ambiguous.
The tentative what-if-romance is a mere 84 minutes and for the most of the first ten minutes, there’s no dialogue. Instead, we watch a restless dark-haired man strolling through the streets of Barcelona. This is Ocho. He checks into his Airbnb, sightsees, aimlessly trawls Grindr out of apparent boredom and observes the passing strangers from his balcony. One in particular, a blond in a KISS t-shirt, catches his attention and there’s a frisson of a spark between the two, even separated by an entire street. The two meet again later at a beach, but neither seems willing to pierce the tension that seems to loom over. It’s not until later that Ocho works up the courage to invite the stranger up from the street. So, the blond, Javi, enters the narrative.