The Other Way Around

(Volveréis, Jonás Trueba, Spain/France, 2024)

A Pursuit of Happiness

With this film, you have to start with the ending – not the traditional final scene of the drama or comedy, but the montage that carries us right through four minutes of rolling end credits (all of which are given in a computer-age format, starting with its stars and co-writers: _VITO SANZ_ITSASO ARANA).

Writer-director Jonás Trueba gives us what would be, anywhere else, a spectacularly corny kaleidoscope-mosaic of superimposed and vignetted faces of people in a happy crowd listening to a live performance by Manu (Alonso Díaz Carmona) and his reunited band of the song “Sepárate” (complete with a ‘rave up’ ending, whacking drums and extending the final chord ad infinitum). The montage captures smiles, laughs, furtive comments, embraces, glances … and it is glorious.

In other words, it’s an ending that never wants to end – and neither, as a viewer, could I bear it to end. Moreover, it’s an ending that refuses to act like a clear, unambiguous ending. Nothing is truly resolved or settled by it.

The song is all about leaving things behind, literally “separating yourself” from your past attachments. And that is what, all along, our central characters, Alex (Sanz) and Ale (Arana), have been announcing they will do: separate from each other. But with a twist that befuddles their friends and causes general social and familial confusion: they want to celebrate their parting (not mourn or hide or apologise for the fact), just as they celebrated their original wedding, with a party and a band playing.

So, what is it that they are actually doing during the end credits: separating, or rather, reuniting? The very final image-fragment – two lovebirds in a graphic-shaped heart – doesn’t really solve that mystery for us, either. Maybe the ex-married lovers have simply re-emerged as loving friends. Why not? Wouldn’t that be a very 21st century way to reconsider our loves, attachments, relationships?

To put the matter another way: is this a comedy of remarriage? That is to say, the story of a marriage that hits the rocks, goes through a difficult period of disenchantment … but finally (after various serious and comical complications and detours – all those adventures of ‘setting sail’ evoked in the lyrics of “Sepárate”) – the marriage rallies with a new conviction, passion and dedication: a re-birth of love.

For once, at least, the critic cannot be accused of importing into a film an item of theory that is wholly foreign to it. Because Trueba hands you the key to his kingdom openly, several times over: Ale’s father (played with a superb drollness by the director’s own father, Fernando Trueba) lends to her and briefly summarises certain aspects of the work of American philosopher Stanley Cavell (1926-2018), well-known for his classic 1981 book on cinema’s comedies of remarriage, Pursuits of Happiness.

That book is, in truth, a little odd. Focusing on a small corpus of classic American comedies of the the 1930s and ‘40s, it explores several wonderful films in which a marriage faces a crisis (usually involving divorce, achieved or imminent) and comes out the other end duly revitalised – such as Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937) and Howard Hawks’ more cynical His Girl Friday (1940). But Cavell also includes (equally wonderful) films in which a bad, unwise marriage is avoided altogether (George Cukor’s Holiday [1938]), or the marriage situation is initially a grand con job (Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve [1941]), or marriage, in any traditional sense, is scarcely an issue at all (Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night [1934]).

But let’s grant Cavell the freedom to dissolve these rational borders of argument: the important thing is the existence (in whatever form) of an involving, committed, amorous relationship. A situation that is, in other words, a little more intense than what we normally associate with the genre label of romantic comedy – although The Other Way Around is also a rich rom-com, as shown by its loving, digital re-creation of the split-screens of 1950s Doris Day/Rock Hudson entertainments.

Among the many concepts that Cavell muses on in Pursuits of Happiness is a loosely Freudian idea: that the finding of love is always a re-finding of it. But he doesn’t mean, by this, that we are all destined to marry our mother-figures or father-figures. Cavell prefers the notion that love, in its fullness over our lifetimes, partakes of what Nietzsche described (and The Other Way Around cites) as an eternal return: a constant cycle of losing, questioning and re-affirming of the initial bond.

This is a philosophy we find expressed, in very different ways, in the cinema of Philippe Garrel, Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1954), Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece Eyes Wide Shut (1999), or even James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989) – dramas (rather than strictly, generically delimited comedies) of remarriage. Or – Trueba includes this key as well – the films of Blake Edwards, such as 10 (1979) and the sublime That’s Life! (1986, scripted by the director with his psychoanalyst, Milton Wexler!).

Trueba grounds us, at the outset, in a literal scenario of a 14-year marriage that is on the very brink of dissolution – note that Ale and Alex have almost the same name, joined together as in a mirror reflection. Of course, that sameness – that stale repetition and routine over time – is a core problem. The process of eternal return characteristic of the drama-comedy of love and remarriage requires a little (or a lot of) disequilibrium – a real shake-up, which usually involves the airing of long-held grievances and resentments (exactly as we see in McCarey and Hawks). A brewing storm is much needed, as Alex comments early on.

The Spanish title Volveréis means “you will come back”, and that prediction is uttered several times in the film (starting with Manu: “You’ll get back together after this, I’m convinced”): friends of the central couple predicting that, rather than parting (or immediately after it?), they will, finally, painlessly return to their union. The song performed over the opening credits asks: which of the two people in a parting couple will come back?

But do Ale and Alex ever return, individually or together? Indeed, do they even part? That’s the mystery posed by the final montage.

The English title, The Other Way Around, points to a different verbal motif from the film – and, indeed, the type of playful, Wittgensteinian language-game that Cavell discusses at length in his book. Ale and Alex often go around and around in their dialogues, as at the opening discussion that takes place under a black screen – in the dark, as it were: “Two people decide to get married – but the other way around”. Reversibility and paradox: their relationship can only continue – differently – if it is discontinued!

They differ as to whether they are both “at the same point” that is required to celebrate their separation. It is all an echo of Cary Grant and Irene Dunne batting back forth about whether they are “the same” or “different” in the final scene of The Awful Truth. Trueba’s film builds both its tension and its special sense of humour through the accumulation of same-but-different scenes (one of them conducted in English) of people’s incredulous responses to Ale and Alex’s marital dare.

But there is something else added to the classical remarriage plot structure, crystallised in Ale’s thought that follows the couple’s initial philosophising: “I’ve always thought it could be a good idea for a film. It could work as a film. But in real life … I don’t know”. At this point – when light enters the image, and it could be the characters awaking from a dream – a deep doubt is planted in the spectator’s mind, and the film will never cease toying with it: are the scenes of the scenario we are watching unfold actually part of a film project, or the couple’s real life? Which parts are which? And on which plane do we end up? It’s a very familiar structure of reflexivity/perplexity that cinema has been serving up to us since the 1960s: abiding confusion about the film-within-the-film and the film itself.

It is at the 23-minute mark that this tricky structure begins to take hold and make mischief. A relatively banal image we have already viewed (Alex walking along the street) reappears on the editing monitors of Ale and her filmmaking associate. So, when did glimpses of the film-within actually begin, how far back? And now this other film – a phantom-shadow of the one we’ve been watching so far – moves forward into a new scene (one in which Alex, learning to paint, also needs to view his subject ‘the other way around’, literally upside-down).

Then there’s another layer, with its built-in references to Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973): a TV series starring Ale’s friend Fer, which is in search of an ending (unlike Ale and Alex who, she remarks, are “not being renewed for another season”) …

It is, from Trueba’s vantage point, a game of transitions (which is exactly what the characters argue about at the montage desk): is a cut from scene to scene also a passage from one reality-status, one level of fiction (or reality) to another? But even within scenes – seemingly so naturalistic in their performance and mise en scène – there are tiny perturbations of the flow, like a jolting match-cut from Alex seen from his right-hand side and to him seen from his left-hand side. Are these trigger-shots, switching the circuit?

Trueba is a fascinating filmmaker. He can be placed within an international grouping of directors who make whimsical, low (or modestly) budgeted films about interpersonal relationships in everyday life: members of this loose alliance include Éric Rohmer, Hong Sang-soo, Guillaume Brac, and two notable Australians, James Vaughan (Friends and Strangers, 2021) and Bill Mousoulis. Their films often involve a structural game like the one in The Other Way Around, or a central, gnawing ambiguity that makes the seemingly overt fable a little hard, by the end, to interpret confidently.

The name of Trueba’s production company, Los Ilusos, sparks another, pertinent association in my mind. The word ílusión is a strange, initially confusing word for non-Spanish speakers: it seems to mean illusion – a fake, fantasy image, a delusion – and that decoding is correct, but it just as often means success, or at the least the hope or dream of success (Spanish banks are always trying to sell ilusiónes to their customers). A flagrant contradiction, it would seem! Or, at least, a paradox. With this common, semantic point of overlap: both illusion and success are things that shine brilliantly, that dazzle the viewer.

So, to return (eternally) to the ending: is what happens during the last four minutes of The Other Way Around an illusion (romantic love is not, after all, eternally binding) or a success (love conquers all)? All I can conclude is only one, certain thing: it’s dazzling.

© Adrian Martin 18 & 19 April 2025