La vida
era para otros

There is a laugh that hurts.

Not the laugh of a joke, but that of the one who understands too late that the joke everyone else is laughing at had nothing to do with him, and consequently, that he isn’t part of it. That laugh, melancholic and absurd, defines the tone of this film.

La vida era para otros explores the paradox of looking for something real in a world where everything seems artificial and staged. The protagonist (the protagonists?) wanders a nocturnal Barcelona where every person he meets is a different way of inhabiting alienation and loneliness: the young women who don’t live but photograph themselves, the reggaeton crowd like zombies with no will of their own, the model who is a mere walking mannequin, the prostitute who sells the only possibility of human connection (and the man who becomes obsessed with buying it from her).

In the middle of this collective delirium, the protagonist wants to be seen and recognised (since love is out of his reach, and he knows it). And he finds it, or something like it, in an exchange of money under a flickering light. What’s devastating isn’t that he pays for company, but that this bought moment is the truest thing the night (and the world) can offer him.

La vida era para otros is a film about the genuine pain of wanting to belong to something seemingly beautiful and false, simply because it’s the only thing there is. And falseness is better than emptiness.