On Thursday, Sam and I leave with a group of friends to visit Spain. We’ll be there for a week, and then the friends we’re with are going to travel on to Portugal for another week after that, Sam is going to head home, and I’m going to go to France for a week by myself. It’s a big trip, we’ve been looking forward to it for a long time, and I can’t wait to experience it all. It’s going to be great.1 !!
Our first stop on the vacation is Barcelona, where we’re going to spend three nights. Sam and I visited Barcelona once before, and we really loved it. But obviously it’s a totally different sort of trip when going with a big group of friends, and we’re really looking forward to having a chance to go out, explore the city, stay out late and have fun as a group.
In order to get ready for Barcelona though, this weekend I insisted that Sam and I watch End of the Century, a 2019 gay indie movie that takes place over two days (sort of) in Barcelona. (There’s a lengthy flashback scene that makes up the middle third of the movie). I can’t say it’s like.. a movie that *celebrates* Barcelona itself. It doesn’t make the city look like a magic paradise — it’s not Midnight in Paris for Barcelona, in other words. But it definitely has the low-key European city travel vibe that I love. So it was a great primer for the trip in that sense. The movie is slow in parts and a little lonely, but it has that energy of figuring out how to spend time in a strange, new place and not knowing what’s going to come next. I love it.
End of the Century is a movie about choices. It’s about how, like — if we make a certain choice in life, we necessarily close doors that might have been open to us if we’d chosen differently. Which I guess seems like a pretty obvious point. I live in Chicago, and that’s why I don’t live in Denver. If I lived in Denver, I would have a different life than if I lived in Chicago. Got it. But like.. it’s also a lot more than that. How do we know we’re happy with the choices we actually made? What if we were forced to revisit them? Do we know that they were “choices” at all, or is it just that life sort of worked out that way? Maybe this movie resonates so much with me because it makes a particular point about reaching the milestone of two decades of adulthood — it’s a lot of time to look back on. To wonder about — did I spend my time the way I really wanted?
Honestly, the fact that we can’t go back and revisit the past is ultimately very freeing, isn’t it? How many things about my 20s and 30s would I obsess over and torture myself with, if I could actually re-live those decisions? I’m here now. My life is a good one, and I’m very happy. To the extent there are things about myself I’m still working on, well … life is long, and the future isn’t written yet. That’s exciting. But all the various branches and possibilities that existed in the past and now are gone — those can be really haunting, if you dwell on them too much.
Anyway. I don’t want to spoil the movie for anyone who still wants to watch it. You should see it! It’s a $4 rental on AppleTV+. It’s less than an hour and a half long, and it does contain some really beautiful shots. It’s also incredibly honest about gay relationships and gay hookups in a way that so few movies really get right. As gay movies go, it’s definitely in my top three or four. Check it out.
The week in France by myself is honestly still daunting to me, just a little bit. I’ve never traveled for that long by myself. No idea how it’ll go, but I’m really excited. Might do some writing that week. I hope so.