\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.tcocdn.com\/tco\/images\/The-Other-Way-Around.jpg\")
<\/p>\n [ad_1]
\n<\/p>\n
You almost can\u2019t quite believe that someone hadn\u2019t had this idea before: a\u00a0well-to-do creative couple living in a\u00a0cosy Madrid apartment decide that they want to wrap-up their 15<\/span>\u00a0year relationship. Instead of being embarrassed or even saddened by the decision, they instead chose to organise a\u00a0big party, on the logic that everyone celebrates union and no-one celebrates separation. And that\u2019s massively unfair on separation.<\/span><\/p>\n Itsaso Arana is the comically unsentimental Ale, an independent filmmaker who refuses to let her guard down and spends the vast majority of the film with a\u00a0scowl on her face as if to transmit her constant air of light annoyance at society and its antiquated precepts. Vito Sanz is Alex, her more neurotic partner who nonetheless is entirely all-in on this eccentric enterprise. The film consists of the couple individually disseminating the invite to friends and family while also fending off repeated accusations that the pair are entirely crazy for doing this. The repeated refrain is that they are wantonly destroying something beautiful.<\/span><\/p>\n And from an audience vantage, you\u2019re inclined to agree, as from the intuitive and loving way in which they interact and make decisions together, they present as the model couple. The paradox of this decision is that no couple who truly despises one another, who feels the pressing need to pack up and move on, would be able to be so civilised when it comes to this amicable parting of ways. It\u2019s never fully evident why the pair are breaking up; the inference also is that they too are making a\u00a0choice as more of a\u00a0rejection of social mores than as a\u00a0pressing desire to be rid of one another.<\/span><\/p>\n Writer-director Jon\u00e1s Trueba \u2013 son of the Oscar-winning Spanish director Fernando Trueba, who co-stars here as Ale\u2019s crestfallen father \u2013 draws on the template of classic Hollywood comedies in which a\u00a0couple in the throes of a\u00a0break-up eventually rediscovers the spark that set them off in the first place (The Awful Truth, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday). Yet while those films tended to focus predominantly on the actions of the central couple, The Other Way Around offers a\u00a0chorus of discourse and commentary and draws humour out of the fact that everyone thinks that Alex and Ale\u2019s decision is an implicit criticism of their own bourgeois complacency.<\/span><\/p>\n To add further to the meta-cinematic layering, Ale is also making a\u00a0film on a\u00a0similar subject, and though we never actually see it, there are scenes documenting the feedback process in which Trueba comically anticipates some of the criticisms that the audience might level at his own film, the main one being the repetitive structure of the various meetings. But things are kept light and funny enough for the momentum to keep rolling, even if the film does lose its way in the final stretch when the couple go through the domestic process of splitting up and a\u00a0more straightforward will they\/won\u2019t they dynamic is introduced.<\/span><\/p>\n Yet in the main this is a\u00a0perceptive, self-analysing delight, and you can absolutely see this being remade in the English language by a\u00a0filmmaker who will definitely sand all the edges down and pull back on everything that makes Trueba\u2019s film so unique.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\nGet more Little White\u00a0Lies<\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n