Split: "The Other Way Around"

On the surface, Jonás Trueba's The Other Way Around would appear perfect summer counterprogramming: a romantic Spanish diversion premised on the reversal of two lovers breaking up. After fourteen years together, actor Álex (Vito Sanz) and filmmaker Alejandra (Itsaso Arana) have decided to go out with a bang, throwing a so-called "separation party": like a wedding, but the other way around, as she puts it. Obstacles, however, stand in the pair's way. For starters, their poky one-bedroom flat in Madrid's bohemian quarter isn't big enough to host a multitude of visitors; the couple's friends, who generally find the notion of a separation party somewhere between deeply odd and actively distasteful, don't know whether they're being entirely serious. The party becomes one more thing to have to organise, along with finding new digs and dividing up their combined belongings. And - most ominously of all - party planning is the kind of long-term project that demands lots of back-and-forth communication and tends to bond people together, not tear them conclusively apart. Around the halfway mark, you may begin to wonder if ghosting isn't a more efficient approach for everybody involved. By then, two obvious criticisms of Trueba's film have also become apparent: as a movie, The Other Way Around is perilously talky and drawn-out. Trueba's rebuttal would be that this talk is what bonds his lovers together, and that they draw matters out precisely because they're developing cold feet on splitting. They can't bear to move on, because who else would they talk to?

There are short-term gains from this approach. The windiness lets some air in on this plot: it's not some frantic romcom contrivance that needs rushing through lest we stop to think how nonsensical it all is, but two people working through some feelings with their mouths and all their windows open. (Trueba's idea of a big setpiece is to set Álex and Ale to talking while they wait for the kitchen sink to unblock.) A kind of amused and bemused life shambles into shot. It's striking that Trueba's leads aren't the ripe young things typically offered up for our delectation in a route-one romcom, but individuals old enough to have spent fourteen years together. Sanz is a dead ringer for Alex Karpovsky, the talismanic Ray of TV's Girls, and part of the gag here is that these folks should be seasoned enough to know better, to not be fooled by love. Instead, Ale turns out to be working on a film called - yup - The Other Way Around, a development that might suggest Trueba has taken a diversion right up his own fundament were it not also indicative of a character struggling to get her story straight in her own head. The movie that lands among us lapses frequently into repetition - old habits - but knows it full well; as one of the participants in a focus group for Ale's film puts it, "it's the same thing over and over". It helps the couple to tell every last one of their friends they're breaking up, because it allows them to spark the conversation that allows them to drag their feet: a stop-off at the home of Ale's father (Fernando Trueba, the storied Spanish filmmaker and Jonás's father) leaves everyone on screen chewing over whether cinema makes us better people, and leaves you and I newly impatient for something to be resolved either way. As infuriating as it is endearing - as trying as certain real-life couples among our acquaintance - The Other Way Around is destined to be an acquired taste, yet there's a mild charm in its shruggy shagginess; unhurried, resolutely human, taking cues from a Bergman-themed tarot pack, it's another world away from the summer's insistently linear, entirely mechanised blockbuster fare.

The Other Way Around is now showing in selected cinemas.