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).
