I saw your eyes/You made me smile/For a little while/I was falling in love... As Space Age Love Song? by A Flock of Seagulls plays, two young men dance around a Barcelona apartment, circa 1999. The seductive yet wistful song and a fair amount of liquor send Ocho (Juan Barberini) and Javi (Ramón Pujol), both of whom have girlfriends, fumbling and tumbling into a sexual encounter Javi will look back on years later as a life-changing moment.

This sequence actually forms the middle section of End of the Century, Argentine writer-director Lucio Castro's emotionally muted yet fascinating debut feature. We see Ocho and Javi at three points in time, with Ocho's journey our central reference. In the first, the two men cross paths in present day Barcelona. After a day of missed cues, they hook up, after which Javi reveals that they've met before. An extended flashback follows, detailing the fateful series of events that led to that passionate night 20 years before. In the film's final time shift, we're back in the present, or maybe the very near future, and in this reality, Ocho and Javi have been a couple for years.

Have they been together since the Flock of Seagulls night? Castro clearly wants us to decide such things for ourselves, just as he means for the shift from the first section to the second to be abrupt and disorienting. The shift from the film's middle section, when the men are young, to the third, when they're older and settled, is smoother, more artful. We know where we are but Ocho seems less certain. He's with Javi, living the day, being domestic, but he's also slightly removed, as if trying to decide if this life (with Javi) is the one he wanted, the one he most needed.

Back in his 20s, before his first time with Javi, Ocho begins reading Closer to the Knives, a memoir by the late David Wojnarowicz, a queer artist famous for a black and white photograph of buffaloes falling off a cliff to their deaths. At one point, Castro sends Wojnarowicz's words gliding across the screen, right to left, in a bold font, so we don't miss a word:

I'm getting closer to the coast and realize how much I hate arriving at a destination. Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.

Those words rolling across the screen thrilled me more than Ocho and Javi's romance, which is both heated and tame. They're unpredictable in bed and a bit too polite out of it, which makes this a love story unlikely to satisfy those hoping for a tumultuous heart-wrecker in the mode of Weekend or God's Own Country. And yet, End of the Century sticks in the brain, asking more questions than it answers. More movies should.

I think I'll always worry about Ocho, who doesn't have Javi's gift for accepting the present, much less truly embracing it. In his 20s, Ocho wants family ?a houseful of kids ? but in his 40s, he's unencumbered and feels exultant. He's free, just like Wojnarowicz. By the movie's end, Ocho looks a bit stunned, as if he's just realized that it isn't in him to choose the right life, or to be happy with it if he did.

End of the Century now thru Sept. 27 at Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd. (310) 473-8530. landmarktheatres.com