“She had dark hair, and only blonde women were allowed to be nice.” The reaction of the public to her was deeply troubling to the young Castro. His mother was an actor who appeared in telenovelas, where she was invariably cast as a killer. He launched his own line in 2011 these days, he designs for a Chinese company. I saw Hitchcock before I had seen my first Disney Lucio CastroĬastro may seem rather long in the tooth to be making his feature debut, but he has already cultivated a successful career as a fashion designer. “But it all made it more flavourful.” My mother loved films, especially thrillers. And in the park, you might get killed!” He gives a nervous laugh. On the phone, you didn’t know what the person looked like. When I first came out, the options available to me were phone sex lines and cruising areas. Anything that is difficult to achieve has charm. “Grindr is very practical, and a genius idea, but it’s so easy that it never fulfils you. But he argues that something valuable has been lost with their arrival. First, gay men have sex – then they go for wine and cheese.’ Between gay men it can sometimes be easier and less revealing to sleep together than to have a conversation.”Īs someone in a long-term relationship, Castro admits he is hardly an authority on apps such as Grindr. “A female friend of mine who saw the film said, ‘OK, now I understand. Whereas the sex scenes in Haigh’s Weekend built in intensity and detail as the film went on, End of the Century gets down to brass tacks.
Back then, he was so terrified of Aids that he felt nauseous after his first gay encounter fast-forward to now and he is so blasé about taking the HIV prophylactic drug PrEP that Javi has to practically demand he wears a condom. During Ocho’s earlier visit to Barcelona, he cadges a room from the ex-girlfriend of a friend and happily shoots the breeze with her now he stays in a characterless Airbnb and scrolls morosely through Grindr. It’s not as if there aren’t plenty of unforced contrasts between the separate time periods covered by End of the Century. The Irishman showed the limitations of that – while Robert De Niro’s face is youthful, his body is obviously not. That’s one of the advantages of budgetary restrictions because now I see the fact that Ocho and Javi don’t change physically as one of the strongest parts of the movie.
“Back then, if we’d had the money, I would have said yes. I wonder if Castro would have used de-ageing technology for his actors, as Scorsese did in The Irishman. Lucio Castro, director of End of the Century. He’s been through this once already with Ocho, and he’s thinking, does he recognise me?” He still likes him and there’s the nostalgia, which is new, but it’s not the same kind of fascination he had before. What I did was to consider how Javi related to Ocho now compared to when they first met. 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.