The Other Way Around: Jonás Trueba’s wonderful upside down rom com

“What if we held a party to celebrate our break-up?” filmmaker Ale tells her partner of 14 years, the actor Alex, during a conversation in bed while a summer storm looms in the background. They’ve decided that it is time to let go.

This is the brilliant premise of Jonás Trueba’s nostalgic eighth feature, The Other Way Around, winner of the best European film at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in 2024. The original Spanish title, Volveréis, translates more accurately as ‘You’ll get back together’ – the unflinching assertion uttered by the couple’s family and close friends practically every time they share the news, setting up a ‘Will they, or won’t they?’ plot – but instead of the usual romcom scenario (getting together), here it’s the other way around. The central couple is played by an enticingly moody Itsaso Arana – a filmmaker herself, director of the brilliant play within a film within a rehearsal The Girls Are Alright (2023) – alongside Vito Sanz, with his perfect comic timing. Both stars also double as co-writers, and it’s their third time around as a screen couple for Trueba, after The August Virgin (2019), and You Have to Come and See It (2022).

The film’s premise comes from something that Jonás’s father – the Oscar-winning director Fernando Trueba (Belle epoque, 1999; Chico & Rita, 2010; The Artist and the Model, 2012) – has maintained for years: that it is separations that should be celebrated, not unions. Which is exactly what he tells Ale in The Other Way Around, in a delightfully tender cameo as her father, adding, “It’d be a great idea for a film.”

In The Other Way Around, life playfully informs film, and vice versa, as in a hall of mirrors, where cinema, memories and possibilities are forever multiplied and entangled, in a game not dissimilar to Federico Fellini’s surreal masterpiece about the process of creativity 8½ (1963), one of the films, along with Groundhog Day (1993), that Trueba had in mind while shooting. As in both those films, the humour of The Other Way Around comes less from slapstick than from wonderfully subtle deadpan observation, in this case based on the ludicrous belief that if you repeat something long enough, it ends up becoming the truth.

Trueba has his protagonists breaking the news over and over again, allowing him to introduce us to their world, in which they are hailed as the perfect couple. It is also in these interactions that comedy is more present, and perhaps what makes the film so relatable, when a lifetime of daily routines become absurd in their sheer repetition, free from the veil of infatuation.

Still, this is an ode to cinema, expressed in the myriad filmic references through which humour is mostly conveyed here, including a Bergman Tarot deck. The film nods to classic Hollywood romcoms such as The Philadelphia Story (1940) and His Girl Friday (1940), and even to the split screens of Pillow Talk (1959), courtesy of Marta Velasco’s fantastically playful editing, which foregrounds the film’s own artifice and sense of reiteration.

After all, we are creatures of habit. And repetition, defined as a form of loyalty by Trueba himself, is the pillar of the director’s career, his films playing like the chorus of a known song – familiar, nostalgic and celebratory in their variations – where cinema, friendship, love, memories, music and Madrid are all interchangeable and present.

Carefully crafted low-budget productions, Trueba’s films are the result of a collaborative project, Los Ilusos (‘The Wishful Thinkers’). This is an independent production company founded by Trueba and producer Javier Lafuente, and named after their 2013 film; the films – which include Arana’s The Girls Are Alright – all use the same small crew and group of actors, creating the necessary safe space to achieve the authenticity they display.

For the philosopher and cinephile Stanley Cavell, who is referenced in the film, cinema’s power of transformation generates from its deep connection to daily life and the human experience. Cinema and life merge in The Other Way Around, and the film we are watching is, in fact, the same one Ale is painstakingly editing all along – perhaps in an attempt to edit out what doesn’t work in their relationship off camera; to fix things, to find the magic again.

Likewise, in an art class, Alex has been working on a portrait of Ale for a year so closely that he can no longer see it for what it is, until the teacher invites him to turn it upside down. At the heart of The Other Way Around lies a recognition of the ephemerality of romance: with another person, with cinema, with life. And it is in repetition that we get to relish that which we love. Again and Again.

► The Other Way Around is in UK cinemas 11 July.