The Days to Come

Vir and Lluís live together in Barcelona. Their relationship is fairly new and they have made no long term decisions. Vir becomes pregnant. Neither had planned it. The process of deciding takes up the whole film: whether to continue, to move, to marry, to change jobs and to put up with each other. Months pass, the belly grows, and each month the relationship is strained from a different direction. Carlos Marques-Marcet directs. María Rodríguez Soto and David Verdaguer take the leads. Its most concrete side is the way it was made: the two actors are a couple in life as well, and shooting ran for nine months across her real pregnancy. The belly is not a prosthetic. That method shows directly in the narrative; the change of the body is not fiction and the order of the scenes is necessarily tied to a calendar. The narrative sets pregnancy up as neither happiness nor catastrophe; the subject is a relationship having to carry something it is not ready for. The dialogue was worked with room for improvisation and the argument scenes carry the mark of it. It was shot in Catalan and won festival awards in Spain. Who it is for: viewers who like relationship drama and realist playing. Who it is not for: the plot is thin, the arguments repeat, and the film consists largely of two people talking.