You just see yourself as this unchanging fact. When I call Pujol, at home in Barcelona, he says: “If you think about how you were 20 years ago, it’s not as if you imagine yourself younger. Ocho seems physically looser as a younger man and far quicker to smile, while Javi in his 20s has a perkiness that has hardened by his 40s into something more sceptical, even wary. “When I think about my memories it’s not like, ‘Oh look, I’m having a flashback now.’ It all runs together and I wanted to do that in the movie, too.”Ĭastro focused instead on behavioural changes. “We didn’t use a sepia filter for the past,” Castro says. In fact, it is one of the curious masterstrokes of End of the Century that in slipping back and forth across time it refuses the usual signifiers of such transitions, such as changes in hairstyle. It is from here that the action flashes back to the same city two decades earlier, when the lives of both men, then in their 20s, were markedly different. In one, the reunited lovers, Ocho (Juan Barberini) and Javi (Ramón Pujol), share a post-coital meal of wine and cheese with Barcelona spread out beneath them in the dusk. The setting seems appropriate given several crucial scenes in the movie take place on terraces or balconies. He is speaking from the terrace of his house in New York City, fighting to make himself heard over shrieking sirens.
