Arnau Vilaró | Entreacte (Intermission) / 2024

somewhere between nostalgia and melancholy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arnau Vilaró (screenwriter and director) Entreacte (Intermission) / 2024 [25 minutes]

 

Catalan Spanish director Arnau Vilaró’s Entreacte is about time, and either the nostalgia or the melancholy that passing time creates. In the very first scene, where David (David Selvas) is acting in a series of Strindberg fragments, the director asks him about the piano piece which someone in the character’s apartment building once seemed to play for him every night. David suggests that it is the pain that the piece embodies, changing the word pain to nostalgia. But the theater director (Xavier Albertí) challenges him if it might not be melancholy. “Nostalgia is specific. Melancholy is profound and persists.” We suspect that if David thought he might return to that apartment building that so energized him, he might be willing to describe the sensation he now feels as nostalgia; but if he has lost the place forever and there is no returning, it may be closer to melancholy.

     The director asks if David thinks he will ever hear this piano piece again.

    Immediately after, the director evidently as called for his own “intermission,” as the actors debate where to go for lunch, David suggesting a new Argentine restaurant. But at that moment he receives a telephone call, taking us on a voyage which makes it appear that the luncheon “entreacte” has taken place over days or even weeks.

     The phone call, of which we hear only David’s responses, is elliptical and vague. David’s response is “Yes, yes, perfectly,” and a few seconds later the question “And do we both have to go?” Then he adds, “Sure, sure. No, everything’s the same. Yes. Alright. Thank you.”

   The first sentence is seemingly unimportant, perhaps simply a response to whether the phone connection is clear or whether he recognizes who is calling. But the second is an important clue, since it involves attending something and going with someone; involving an “other.” And it is that clue that takes us on the long intermission that David seems, immediately after, to embark upon.

    David’s first stop is a gay bar for a drink, totally empty except for the sensuous, dancing bartender. He returns to what is obviously his apartment building, checking his mail, and beginning up the staircase to his own apartment. But midway he stops and turns—taking yet another intermission—traveling by tram to visit an urban animal sanctuary or zoo. He visits the section devoted to birds where he finds a single caretaker (Arnau Comas) feeding two wild avians. David asks the worker if he knows Gerard, Gerard Poblet, who works with the birds.

   When that name seems to be unknown to the avian zookeeper, he asks after Sonia, “a tall girl, brunette…with big eyes.”

    The birdkeeper answers: “The Foundation fired many people, it could be that.” But, he adds, that was about a year ago. He, the stranger responds, is now the only one who works with birds. “Because they left me alone with everything.”

     In the very next frame David has moved on from the enclosed spaces that attempt to recreate the birds’ original habitats to the open wet-lands somewhere in the country, where the same birds actually live. This, we soon perceive, is a wild wetland where there are also keepers or, at least, bird and other animal specialists who keep watch over the natural world.

     David finds the small building where obviously the workers sleep, but no one is there. He waits

out the day in his car, observing the return in darkness of two workers by motorcycle, who enter the building on whose door he had previously knocked. Strangely, he does attempt to meet up with them, one of whom we presume is the man he is seeking, Gerard.

    The film, now almost 14 ½ minutes in, announces its title, or perhaps its very next action: “Entreacte.”

      When the narrative returns, David is now standing on his apartment balcony, the noise of the city heard loudly from where he stands. When he reenters his apartment, he dictates a voice mail to the missing Gerard, which explains to us his actions of the first Act of this drama.

      We immediately discover that David is now living in his grandmother’s old place, and that he and Gerard have not spoken to one another for about a year after 10 years of a relationship, the very length of both perhaps explaining his reticence to suddenly show up in Gerard’s life, particularly when he is with another man.

     David explains that he is now seeing a somewhat younger man, but taking things slowly and that his still acting with his theater company, preparing a new play based in Strindberg’s pieces. He recalls that they had seen Miss Julie together, but this Strindberg will be a long piece with an intermission. “You always said you liked plays with an intermission because then you had time to remember and imagine what would happen in the second part.” He explains that he no longer plays the roles of young lovers. Now he is playing a paranoid writer who spends his time concentrating on the past.

      He pauses for a cigarette break, another short intermission, before pacing out what else he has to day. Actually, he begins all over again, greeting Gerard and commenting that it may be a strange to receive such a voice mail. He explains that he received a call from the adoption center, and there is now a child for them. “And they want both of us to go, of course.” Obviously, he observes, the situation is not the same as when they first did the paperwork. The process starts again. “You might find it crazy, but it’s been for me to imagine what would have happened if this child had come a year ago. What would have happened between us, of course. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so foolish to break up all of a sudden. Could have imagined if it had arrived 7 years ago when we started the paperwork? Most couples do that. Decide to have a child, have sex, and that’s it.”

     He reminds Gerard that he was finishing his Ph.D, and that he was looking for employment as an actor, and working extra hours at a bar. He talks about not having any money, of needing to give up luxuries if they had had a child. He also recalls his father, who had Alzheimer’s, regretting that he never told him that Gerard was his partner, not just a friend.

     He explains that after the call, he went to the museum (what I described as the zoo), and he explains that when he was told that Gerard no longer worked there he went to the Delta, to where Gerard had always wanted to return but didn’t because of David.

     David explains that he visited the Delta and waited to see him, but when he saw him on his motorcycle: “I can’t tell you what I felt. I can’t explain it to you. But I understood how much you loved me. Until I allowed it.”

     He explains that he went to Delta because he felt that it was something he could get back, much like the song the figure in his Strindberg play hopes to find again in the song a resident played every night just for him. But he realizes also that it had been something he had lost a very long time ago. “But maybe…neither.”

     The film ends there. And we left with the question of “Neither” what? Maybe neither of these ex-lovers can get back what they lost? That’s a strong likelihood. Throughout we see the urban world around David constantly changing, rebuilding itself. But the new will not include what the old did. Certainly, t will not include the world David knew.

     But Perhaps he means that it is neither nostalgia or melancholy, but a desperate and meaningless longing and desire to return to what cannot be returned to, akin to nostalgia perhaps, but not the same precisely because one knows he will never experience it again; and yet not precisely melancholy since he has already moved on, has already found a new friend as Gerard may also have. It is like the strange pause of an intermission, part of the past that yet permits one to imagine a future of the second act, or the next part of one’s life.

     We can imagine that there will be no child entering into the life of these two lovers, likely no reunion between them; but we can also dream of those very possibilities. That is what art allows, the mind to imagine something impossible, a halt to the mistakes of the past, a new creation built upon its foundations, while also knowing that such a thing is rare and nearly impossible.

     Fortunately, Vilaró’s profound work stops mid-sentence, allowing its viewers to create their own second act. Surely, many will see only a repeat of what old age brings, David, like his father, falling into Alzheimer’s without perceiving the truth, his acting career having come to an end; while others, admittedly like me, might imagine a longer play wherein Gerard feels similarly, that the child has permitted them a new possibility to rekindle the love they once had. There is no answer what happens but the decisions the characters—that we ourselves make.

 

Los Angeles, July 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).