With The Other Way Around, Jonas Trueba makes his Cannes debut in the Quinzaine des réalisateurs with a stimulating and deeply moving comedy about remarriage.
It was in the Madrid summer heat that the characters played by Itsaso Arana and Vito Sanz first fell in love before our very eyes in The August Virgin (2020). A few years later, we found them again in winter and spring, as a couple, settled in, confronted with the existential concerns of life and a post-Covid world in You Have to Come and See It (2023). Today, after fifteen years together, they part ways in The Other Way Around and, rather than bury their love in remorse and regret, they decide to throw a party to celebrate it. Three tales for four seasons, and a final episode in the tradition of the comedy of remarriage – with Itsaso Arana more Katharine Hepburn-like than ever – a genre favored by Stanley Cavell, whose name and thoughts have always inspired Trueba’s cinema. Does cinema make us better? asks one of his famous works. The Other Way Around could be an affirmation of this. The film’s very core and genesis converges towards this idea; the screenplay chooses to put things into perspective when it comes to the two characters, who are determined to adopt this noble attitude and aware that consenting to a somewhat vain pursuit of happiness would be difficult to uphold.
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The Other Way Around also embraces this thinking within its form and mechanisms, which consist in integrating, within Ale and Alex’s daily lives, the images of the film that she is making, and in which he has the main part. Playing on the indecision between the two realities of life and filming, the film never ceases to blur the bearings of its narrative, so that we lose sight of whether it is moving forward or repeating itself. In certain scenes, we follow Ale to the editing room, where she and her editor decide on the future layout of her film, still only at its very beginnings. She makes mistakes, tries things out, sometimes comes up with something. By revealing the underbelly of artifice, a principle already at work in Who’s Stopping Us, a lengthy documentary on teenagers, something of an eulogy of the attempt appears in this repetition of gesture. It seems to be a way of preserving a certain beauty of the unfinished, of the ordinary in a film of impressive scope, supple progression and liveliness. Perhaps the best thing about it, then, is the way in which Trueba, aided by his belief that there is no boundary between life and cinema, charges the triviality of the daily lives of his two former lovers with a profound melancholy. With The Other Way Around, the Spanish filmmaker perfects his logic of subtraction – filming loneliness in The August Virgin so as to better film the group, the friendship of You Have to Come and See it to better depict its failings – and has never better recorded the complicity of love on the eve of its end.
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