Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Live Twice, Love Once’ on Netflix, a Lightweight Spanish Dramedy About an Old Man with Alzheimer’s Disease

Spanish dramedy Live Twice, Love Once (or Vivir dos Veces) is the latest Netflix movie unceremoniously tossed atop the pile of international offerings. This content tier consists of many mid-to-lower-budget productions, dramas and comedies that have little opportunity to elbow their way onto modern marquees; some are modest gems. This one is about a man with Alzheimer’s disease, a common topic in films for adults, but it remains to be seen if it does so with a fresh perspective.

LIVE TWICE, LOVE ONCE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Emilio (Oscar Martinez) parks at his usual restaurant, ordering his usual breakfast from his usual waitress, doing his usual sudoku puzzles. He opens his wallet to pay the tab, but the waitress gently reminds him he already paid. He laughs it off. A scene or two later, a nurse asks him a series of questions that would seem condescending to most adults: What year is it, where are you, etc. One in which he’s asked to subtract three from 30 seems especially insulting, because he’s a retired professor who dedicated his life to mathematics. He even discovered a new prime number.

This, of course, is a baseline test his doctors and the screenplay frequently revisit, to track his inevitable mental deterioration. Like many movie characters of his ilk, Emilio is lightly irascible in an almost-charming manner. Asked by his doctor if he has any family, he says no, but a scene later, we meet his daughter, Julia (Inma Cuesta). Why he answered no, we can’t be certain, although we can assume he prefers to assert his independence, as feisty old widowers in movies tend to do. Julia is a pharmaceutical rep, lightly somber in the face of her father’s illness; her husband Felipe (Nacho Lopez) is lightly goofy and underemployed, with the type of facial hair encouraging us not to trust him; her tween daughter Blanca (Mafalda Carbonell) is also lightly irascible, quick to drop a four-letter word when she isn’t staring at her smartphone.

Emilio and Blanca share similar traits, so it’s no surprise when he shares his secret with her: He yearns to see the girl he loved as a teen, a teen who was too obsessed with numbers to concern himself with matters of the heart. The time Emilio met Margarita is shown in flashback, a memory he knows will soon disappear. Cue a road trip contrived to cram all four principals and their palpable dysfunction into Emilio’s rickety car, on a quest to find the woman who dominated the old man’s memory for decades.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Live Twice, Love Once doesn’t tackle Alzheimer’s with the existential despair of Michael Haneke’s Amour, the bitter heartbreak of Sarah Polley’s Away from Her or the blatant sentimentality of The Notebook — although it borrows a little from all of them. It has more in common with Still Alice, in which Julianne Moore won an Oscar for playing a professor of linguistics and memory (tidy!) who understands all too acutely what’s happening to her mind.

Performance Worth Watching: As the character who tries to keep the family from splintering, Carbonell has a natural, easygoing screen presence, never springing the bear trap of precociousness that sinks its teeth into the ankles of many young actors in these type of roles.

Memorable Dialogue: Emilio establishes his curmudgeonly character in this early exchange with a nurse:

“Where are you right now?”

“Prison.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: This movie has an abundance of warmth, but a dearth of originality. The characters are thin and flimsy, the situations overly familiar. There are scenes where Julia tries to grease the plot wheel with kindness, only to see grouchy Emilio toss sand in the gears — whatever it takes to fill the run time and delay the inevitable conclusion. Emilio is a very smart guy who can’t render his predicament in familiar mathematical terms. Maybe emotions can be reduced down to complex biochemical algorithms, but for the most part, matters of the heart are generally incomprehensible to characters in movies like this. So he walks a path heavy with cliches.

And yet, I extrapolate when this unambitious film doesn’t really deserve it. The screenplay clings to a conventional three-act structure as if it were dangling from a fragile limb over a crevasse. It’s mildly clever, but never outright funny; it’s mildly moving, but never emotionally resonant. I think it wants to jerk tears and make us feel good, and it might do that for some of us. But it takes the middle of the road to a mundane destination, nodding genially in the general direction of deeper truths, never truly acknowledging them in any meaningful way. It’s earnest, well-meaning, entirely watchable and utterly forgettable.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Live Twice, Love Once (an awful, nonsensical title, by the way) is a “nice” movie. Some of you think “nice” is perfectly pleasant. Others, including myself, think “nice” is uninspiring. You know who you are; judge accordingly.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Live Twice, Love Once on Netflix