The Other Way Around review - teasing Spanish study of a breakup with unexpected depth

Can a romcom be intellectually challenging while hitting all the sweet spots of the genre? Jonás Trueba, the director of the award-winning Spanish film The Other Way Around (Volveréis, literally “you will return”), has confected something close to that.

The bare bones of his storyline are that a couple in Madrid, after 14 or 15 years (they don’t seem sure), have mutually decided to separate, and to throw a party in celebration of their split. Like people entering a marriage, they want to be sure their party is like a wedding, but “the other way around”. The action follows their elaborate preparations for the event – the costumes they will wear, the lighting, location, music – which are much like the pre-production work on the film they are making. And there’s a hint that they may have talked themselves into a decision they aren’t quite on the same page about, but the event has gained a momentum of its own. Will one of them, or both or neither, change course?

We don’t directly discover why the couple have begun to consider separating. They don’t row, seem amicably disposed towards each other, go about their daily routines in a way that smacks of compatibility. Their first getting-up scene is a marvel of intricate choreography, showing them operating like a well oiled machine. Or is this routine too robotic? They claim to friends and relatives that the relationship isn’t working for them any more. Are they bored? Envious of the other? Secretly cheating?

Trueba isn’t interested in presenting a trite generic storyline with a final-reel resolution. He is more intent on holding the whole romcom genre up to the light in a dizzying way. As the film plays out, the viewer isn’t quite sure how to interpret what’s on screen. Is it on “our” screen, or part of the film-within-a-film that the leads are working on that sporadically pops up on a monitor? How easy is it to separate these two worlds in the film, especially as the soundtrack often plays over scenes from both, stitching them together?

To complicate matters further, the actors playing the two leads, Vito Sanz and Itsaso Arana, were also Trueba’s cowriters. The three of them have come up with the main characters: Alejandra, nickname Ale, a confident auburn-headed filmmaker, deep into the final edit of her latest film; and Alejandro, nickname Álex, a gentler, more diffident type who is a struggling actor. He seems to be appearing in Ale’s film, which you see in the footage that she and her editor are working on. Sometimes they seem to be editing what you assumed were scenes from Trueba’s film but turn out to be from Ale’s.  

What’s “real” in this film is on the table here; as in, what we are to assume is “really” happening to its characters? Is Ale's film the key to what the couple are going through? Is the whole film really Ale’s film, with a few detours to her edit suite? Adding another enigmatic layer is that Ale’s father is played by the director’s father, the film director Fernando Trueba, a stalwart of Spanish cinema; and he is regularly cited as the source of the separation party idea, which Ale and Álex claim he proposed many times over the years. Or did he? He is an intellectual with a keen interest in film, especially those of Ingmar Bergman. Who also looms large in the life of Álex’s actor friend Fer (Francesco Carril), who treasures his pack of Bergman tarot cards, each featuring a still from a Bergman film with a one-word title underneath. Fer lives his life by these cards, asking them questions each morning though interpreting their meaning as it suits him. 

When you stand back from the film you realise it’s more a teasing hall of mirrors than a romcom, though it never loses the latter’s will-they-won’t-they tensions. More important than its denouement, though, are the truths about love the couple encounter and evaluate along the way to their party (pictured below), especially those of Kierkegaard recommended by Ale’s father. He espouses Kierkegaard’s stress on the importance in love of repetition, of living in the moment rather than in the shifting sands of future adventures with unknown outcomes. He also strategically gives them books about film couples who broke up and got back together again (cue an extract of dialogue from The Philadelphia Story), much as Bergman and Liv Ullman did.The two worlds finally coalesce in a wonderful scene in the couple’s flat in which Ale is filming an audition tape with Alex, in which he is playing an unhappy man on the point of breaking up with his partner, and Ale is cueing his lines by reading the part of the girlfriend, immersing herself in the woman’s character the longer she does it. Surprisingly, in this artificial set-up, she shows an unguarded emotional response.

It’s a scene that could stand in for our experience of watching a film, a playful way of suggesting that the confections of cinema parallel real life and can winkle out truths of their own. And note, the game goes on to the last gasp of the end credits, teasing and enigmatic but very pleasurable if you like this kind of meta-material.

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