Even while watching Love, Divided (Pared con pared) (2024), I went back and forth about how much I liked it. And yes, I’m sure some of that was due to my now very distant memories of Blind Date (2015), the French movie from which it was adapted. “Misty water colored memories…” Honestly, I don’t even know if they count as memories at this point, more just feelings of memories. But either way I don’t want to sit here and compare this movie to that movie. This movie has some very fun set design that makes it feel whimsical. There’s a good story that could have been told so the tension was tighter and the characters more interesting. The acting was iffy at times and there were some flags of the rosy red variety. There is also a cat, so points for that. So you see why my thoughts were up and down, back and forth. Gah! Divided! I just want to say my feelings on this movie were divided. It’s the only word in my brain. It’s up there blinking at me like a giant neon sign and I’m trying to ignore it because it’s in the movie’s title. Diviiiiiidded. Phew. Let’s move on. I almost typed “movie on” by accident, but (thankfully) even I have my limits.
When we meet Valentina (Aitana), she is anxiously watching as her precious piano is lifted into her new apartment by crane. Or, she mostly looks anxious. Aitana is a big pop star in Spain but, when it comes to acting, her range currently appears limited. Most of the time she comes across as fairly flat and it’s difficult to parse any of her emotions. Anyway, her cousin Carmen (Natalia Rodríguez) shows up, rattling off a long list of reasons that she’s late and then GRABS THE CONTROLS FROM THE CRANE OPERATOR (Eduardo Ferrés) who has momentarily stopped moving the piano in order to reposition it. I’m not kidding when I say I almost shut down the entire movie right then and there, because why in the world would you ever? I guess it’s to show that she is a woman who doesn’t take shit and likes to be in control of a situation? If so, there are about a gazillion better ways.
The piano, Carmen, and Valentina all make it safely into the apartment, and I presume the crane guy goes to have a drink with his friends and tell them all about the heckuva day he just had. Carmen mentions what a good deal the apartment is, so you know it’s going to have a Major Flaw. Hang on, we’ll get there. Carmen also mentions that Valentina needs a job to, you know, pay the rent, which Valentina finds surprising because she really needs to focus on practicing for her Big Audition. Come on! But get a job she does, thanks to Carmen’s connections, at a café around the corner, working for Sebas (Paco Tous), a very nice man who adds a lot of charm to this movie .
Meanwhile, on the other side of Valentina’s new wall lives David (Fernando Guallar), a tortured toy inventor with a tragic backstory who has almost never left home in the past three years. His cat Murphy (Pedrito) keeps him company and his best friend Nacho (Adam Jezierski) keeps him stocked on groceries and expository dialogue, which reveals that David hasn’t made a new toy in a long time but that he needs absolute silence while he works and therefore scares off any new tenants in the apartment next door. It’s not the most endearing introduction, but his apartment is amusing and looks a bit like he’s channeling Galileo with his complex wooden structures built of rings and ramps.
The whole movie has this kind of fanciful feel, and I’d been utterly remiss if I didn’t point out how absolutely charming the animated opening credits are. Valentina’s apartment is awash in bright light with sunny yellow accents and light aqua that reflects the color of the banister in her building’s main stairwell. David’s apartment, on the other hand, is full of shadows, a brick wall, and shades of dark blue and green. Super subtle.
On Valentina’s first night in the apartment, while she’s happily singing into her toothbrush about how she hopes to one day “dare to dance in the middle of the street,” she hears horrible booming sounds followed by eerie howls. Valentina hightails it out the apartment and directly to Óscar (Miguel Ángel Muñoz), her ex-boyfriend, who is only too happy to have her back and, he hopes, pliable. (She is, thankfully, onto his ploys.) He tells her that she’s not “ready to live alone” and that the “neighborhood is not for her.” Gross. Dressed entirely in black, he walks toward her from his kitchen, the tails of his Japanese-style robe flapping behind him, making him look like a bird of prey swooping in for the kill. Instead, he does the next worst thing and says “Mon petit hummingbird is spreading her wings” in response to her assertion that she’s absolutely not going to move back in with him and she absolutely is going to prepare for this Big Audition all by herself. There’s a bit more to this story of Valentina and Óscar, but the movie waits until later to clue us in on all the details, which didn’t work so well for me and I wish they’d given me more upfront.
Back at her apartment the next morning, the noises continue and Valentina is scared until, in a moment of silence, she hears a cat meow. At which point she is just hecka pissed because she realizes it’s not ghosts, but the guy next door being a real jerk. I mean, for someone who needs Total and Complete Silence, he’s making a real racket. Long story short, he explains that, even though they don’t live in the same building or even the same district, they share this hollow wall that allows for the smallest sound to pass through. He demonstrates by pouring coffee from one cup to another, which she can hear perfectly. And, he gallantly offers that she’s just going to have to move out because he simply cannot be flexible about the noise or his schedule. Meanwhile she’s not budging because, as we’ve seen, she’s FINALLY escaped an overbearing man who plucked her from her small village and infantilized her and has convinced her that she must pursue this one dream and she’s basically poured her entire being into this sole and solitary audition. So then, these two enemies-but-not-yet-lovers spend some quality time trying to out-obnoxious each other. For awhile it seems like he’s really got the upper hand in this because he has years of experience and understands that sleep deprivation is an excellent form of torture, but she eventually strikes back with a small, but unsettling attack that wins the war.
For a little while, they have an equilibrium where she practices and he waits and then he works and she is quiet. That is until she asks for a few extra minutes to play and he gets annoyed and tells her that she is “not equipped to play Beethoven.” He then proceeds to explain who Beethoven was, how Beethoven felt, and what she lacks to play to Beethoven, which is a super neat trick that no man has tried before. And then she gets so angry with him that her passions flare and she plays Beethoven with the soul that he’s felt her playing has been lacking. Then I had to go find my eyeballs, which had rolled so far under the furniture that it took a solid five minutes to locate them. And yes, I realize some of this is to balance how Óscar is all about music being technically right instead of having fire and passion and as a precursor to David being supportive of her other artistic pursuits and to finding herself, but also (and mostly) just absolutely not. No. We do not need to have the throughline that her prowess is improved by him insulting and rankling her ire. I mean, if that’s their private kink then there’s no shame in that game, but as a trope in a romantic movie? Ew. And also, what about WHAT SHE WANTS? Why do we have to wait until the very end to just see WHAT SHE MIGHT WANT instead of seeing what these men around her want? Ahem. Where was I? So later that day she APOLOGIZES TO HIM. For what? I’m not sure. Being assertive? And then he apologizes to her, but barely. Ugh.
This, of course, is the turning point when ice begins to melt and the romaaaance beings! Can you feel it? Seriously, though, I’m not sure I could ever forgive anyone who purposefully deprived me of that much sleep. The two, seated on the floor, backs resting on very different sides of the same wall, begin to talk and share things. They ask questions, but never each other’s names. It’s Valentina who decides that they should continue like this—together, but apart—so they can both have the time they need to be alone, which I guess is supposed to give her control? I don’t buy it. But, through misunderstandings and personal setbacks, their relationship through the wall continues to grow and deepen. They move their beds head to head against the wall and their tables so they face each other. They cook meals together, though this part fell flat for me because he’s a perfectionist who is instructing her on precisely how to measure the cheese and she’s a people pleaser who won’t tell him everything is a disaster on her side. Come on. For the love of balancing acts! Yes, I guess her presence helps him with some pretty big things by the end of the movie, but he’s always instructing and she’s always intuiting and it feels so lopsided.
Toward the very end of the movie, we get a bunch of information that brings a lot of clarity to several characters and threads. All of it would have been more useful earlier on in the plot to build more empathetic, well-rounded (within reason) characters, a more cohesive story, and tighter overall tension. Though, there still would have been times I would have wanted her to have been just happily living her life with a kick-ass pair of noise-canceling headphones. But this is what we have, and all together it’s not terrible. In fact, overall, it’s pretty okayish, and sometimes pretty-ish okay is perfectly good enough-ish and has some endearing-ish moments.
Overall Rating on the Chronically Streaming Pain Scale:
Chronically Streaming 