Another Man review: A thorny, cerebral psychodrama about a gay couple in Barcelona

Marc (Lluís Marques) is a man who hates everything. Or maybe hate is too strong a word – he isn’t a man who trades in strong feelings. We find him in a stable six-year relationship with a semi-successful filmmaker who wants them to settle down in suburbia to start a family.

Marc is beautiful, has a gorgeous flat in Barcelona, Spain (lots of sunlight, sky-high ceilings), a good art job and a precocious nephew who dances in secret to Britney Spears. All of this, with the vanishing exception of the latter, musters little more than a vicious apathy, the sort of joie de vivre one might expect more of somebody bag-over-head at the gallows or a party queen on a comedown.

Another Man is the first Catalan-language film by Gaudí award nominee David Moragas. It is cerebral and psychologically dense, following Marc’s slow self-destruction in the long, black shadow of his troubled mother’s suicide. She had “built a perfect life for us”, he explains, but now that life has started to curdle and rot. “Beauty,” he laments, “can be repressive, violent, discriminatory.” And so, he starts slinking into soupy, half-sexual fantasy, building an imaginary, idealised life around the unwitting and fawn-faced young man who has just moved into the apartment across from his.

This is a film somewhere between a sordid Scandi psycho-drama – something by Joachim Trier – and Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, the cult novel that recounts the lives of a millennial couple unable to inject their shiny Berlin existence with a sense of purpose. The themes are universal, but Moragas chooses a gay couple as his vehicle, allowing common queer experiences – aborted foursomes, HIV tests and Grindr notifications – to inhabit and drive the drama.

For those who like thorny character studies, there is a lot to like. Marc is proud, political and educated, but is scared of getting boxed in. (He refuses to let the landlady fix a broken toilet, so they don’t get stereotyped as limp-wristed). Simultaneously, he builds walls around himself then climbs to their top, looking down on the “homoliberal” (read: normative, too straight) gay couple his puppy-dog partner Eudald (Quim Ávila) befriends and the ribaldry of his peers. Should we sympathise or roll our eyes? A straightforward answer doesn’t come easy.

All-round strong performances anchor this film. But the plot, although tight, is drawn-out and inexplosive. There are no big arguments, break ups or love scenes, just the footslog of a glossy life disintegrating bit by bit, like watching a Porsche crashing in slow motion. And Marc makes an all-round difficult protagonist to root for across 90 minutes yet also isn’t villainous enough to root against, leaving the viewer as alienated as him. That raw, plodding ambiguity is both the film’s greatest strength and its biggest weakness.

Playing as part of the BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival, running from 18–29 March.

This article first appeared in Attitude Uncut, an all-new digital magazine that will be published six times a year (between Attitude print issues) and available exclusively on Apple News+ and via the Attitude app. Featuring long-read journalism inspired by themes resonating within the LGBTQ+ community, each issue will provide a deep dive into topics as varied as sexuality, identity, health, relationships and beyond. 

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