The Other Way Around
The Spanish 'anti-rom-com' The Other Way Around has a sharp idea at its core, but its repetitive nature makes it a chore to get through
Jonás Trueba’s un-romantic comedy The Other Way Around has a pretty simple premise: Ale (Itsaso Arana) and Alex (Vito Sanz) are breaking up. They spend most of the movie trying to explain to their baffled friends and family that nothing has happened and no one is angry but, after 14 years together, they’ve amicably decided to go their separate ways. In fact, they’re even going to throw a big party to send their marriage off in style.
Throughout, the pair break the news to many different people, usually reciting the exact same lines as they do so. And their story soon begins to blend with scenes from a film that Ale is making so that we often see the same moment recreated, with Trueba finding plenty of clever ways to blur the line between reality and fiction – suddenly rewinding a sequence that had appeared to be taking place in the “real” world or allowing music to spill over between the two realities.
But The Other Way Around's script is too clever for its own good. Its intentional repetitions are eventually explained as a Kierkegaard-inspired idea about how the key to life and love might be learning to live the same moments over and over again. In one extremely meta scene, Ale even defends this idea explicitly after a test screening of her own film. But even once you’ve understood the point of it all, watching the same thing repeatedly recurring simply isn’t that interesting – no matter what Kierkegaard said.
Released 11 Jul by AX1 Films; certificate PG