Love, Divided is a Spanish romantic drama on Netflix about two hopeless romantics who happen upon each other. Love, Divided is not your average movie, depicting a meet-cute followed by the ups and downs of modern dating. Love, Divided is a remake of the 2015 French film Blind Date, which, even though quite cheesy, presents a fresh concept that leads to a romantic development. One might even assume that Love, Divided is a comment on modern-day online dating, in which the participants are reduced to their physical appearance and often misrepresent themselves as well. This movie also shows Valentina’s struggles with living her life by someone else’s standards and how her talents are exploited in the process for someone else’s gain, which, in hindsight, is something women often face. Through David’s character, the movie explores how some people have the tendency to completely isolate themselves as a coping mechanism for grief.
Spoilers Ahead
What Happens When Valentina Moves To Her New Apartment?
Valentina is a young pianist trying to make a name for herself as a professional pianist. She recently broke up with her controlling boyfriend, Oscar, a perfectionist conductor who discourages Valentina from pursuing the music of her choice. Valentina was a singer and songwriter, but because of Oscar, she gave up her dreams. In a few days, Valentina is supposed to give an audition for a pianist for an orchestra, for which she must prepare, but now that she is living alone, she must find a way to balance her life with her new job at a cafe around the corner. With the help of her extremely chatty cousin, Carmen, Valentina moves into a new apartment, which, despite being fancy and having a great location, is quite cheap. She doesn’t pay much heed to the apartment’s cheap rent until she hears eerie noises coming from across the wall. Turns out, her neighbor, David, wants her to vacate the apartment as he wants peace for himself.
Why Does David Want Valentina To Vacate The Apartment?
David is a reclusive young children’s game creator. He has received acclamation for his game, ‘Breaking Mind.’ The financial success of this game is what pays for his livelihood while he is in the process of creating Ultimax, his new game, which he thinks will be the next big thing. His apartment shares a hollow wall with Valentina’s apartment, because of which every single sound travels across. David’s work demands that he focus a lot, and for that, he requires complete silence. David has had quite a few neighbors in the past, and it seems the wall caused problems between him and the previous residents of the apartment where Valentina lives now. With Valentina moving into the apartment, he is disturbed by the sound of Valentina’s piano practice sessions. Fearing another confrontation with his new neighbor, he creates eerie sounds using different tools he happens to possess. However, when Valentina hears his cat meowing from across the wall, she figures out that it’s actually another person behind the wall. Turns out, their apartments aren’t even in the same building or have their entrances on the same street.
Upon a brief introduction about the situation with the wall, Valentina offers a mutually beneficial solution by dividing their schedules according to their preferences, but David turns it down. He suggests that Valentina live elsewhere, but Valentina is desperate, has a time constraint, and cannot move to another apartment. Valentina and David’s disagreement leads to them creatively coming up with ways to make noise until one of them gives up. David makes unsettling noises at night when Valentina is sleeping, while Valentina gets back at David while he is busy at work during the day. This aggressive skirmish between the two continues until David surrenders to the constant sounds of Valentina’s metronome, which he cannot hear any longer.
How Do Valentina And David Get Close?
Following David’s submission, he takes up the solution that Valentina offered. They divide their time to work according to their necessities. Valentina practices her piano in the morning before she heads out for work, and David works once Valentina leaves until the evening. Their schedule initially works out until they have another argument about David being too rigid with the timing. While practicing her piano, Valentina is struggling to memorize a piece by Beethoven, but it has already passed her allotted time slot. David starts creating a scene about it and tells her that her playing has no soul because her playing only sounds like Beethoven but does not feel like Beethoven. She finds his remarks extremely condescending, but arguing with David pushes her to play the piano with the soul that she lacks.
Later in the evening, Valentina and David apologized to each other for their harsh words from earlier. They felt guilty that their remarks about each other had gone too far, and for the first time, they put aside their differences and talked to each other like normal people. Valentina and David tell each other about their lives, including why Valentina moved to the apartment and why David does not step out of the place at all. This makes them realize that they are very similar to each other in an odd way. Especially, for David, he hadn’t had a heartfelt conversation like this in a long time.
Why Does Valentina Decide Not To Meet David In Person?
The next morning, David wakes up to the sounds of Valentina’s piano, and unlike the previous days, he greets her politely. The previous night, upon being asked by Valentina, David described his appearance and said that he only wore cowboy boots. Recalling the description that he stated last night, Valentina expects to run into David at every other corner when she heads out for work. Adding to her embarrassment, she even guesses that one of her customers at the cafe is David, judging by the cowboy boots he is wearing. She leaves this customer a note with her address for dinner at her place. Only after this man turns up at her place does she realize that she has made a mistake.
Following the embarrassing dinner, David, who had finally left his apartment after three months, returns home. Valentina and David recall their moment from last night and mutually agree that they indeed had a good time talking to each other. However, when David asks her out for dinner at his place, Valentina has other plans. She has had a series of misfortunes with dating, including the one she just had. Instead, she suggests that they continue their brewing relationship without meeting each other. This relationship will have no expectations or any kind of pressure, as both of them need to be alone to focus on their lives as well. Even though it seems impractical, both Valentina and David feel that things are indeed perfect the way they are. Therefore, they begin a romantic relationship with each other, sharing a life together but separated by a wall. As David and Valentina get closer, she even performs her own song after David encourages her to sing it, suggesting that Valentina is starting to accept her true self.
David’s friend, Nacho, and Valentina’s cousin, Carmen, come to learn of this relationship when David and Valentina arrange a lunch at their own respective apartments. Even though they find this arrangement awkward initially, they end up approving of it as well.
Why Do Valentina And David End Up Quarreling?
It’s only normal that Valentina and David are drawn closer to each other with every passing day. David wants to see Valentina. As Valentina’s piano audition approaches, she starts to grow anxious as well. To ensure that she performs well in the audition, she invites her ex and mentor, Oscar, to her place to help her practice. She asks David to keep silent while Oscar is at the apartment, and David complies, knowing that it’d be awkward to explain. However, hearing Oscar’s condescending and flirtatious remarks toward Valentina makes him react. Although he does it quietly, Valentina could hear David from over the wall. When Oscar tries to make a move on Valentina, David spoils his attempts by using his tools to make noises.
Valentina, on the other hand, thinks that she had it under control and is furious at David for acting jealous. To be fair, David did feel like she could’ve introduced David and Oscar. Valentina feels that she has had to go through a lot to be at this point in life where she has the freedom of choice. Later, Carmen sneaks into Valentina’s apartment with her fling to hook up with him. However, thanks to them not knowing how thin the walls are, David hears them. Thinking that, following their quarrel, Valentina was sleeping with someone else, he is left heartbroken. When Valentina returns, she apologizes to David for overreacting, but David acts strange and dismissive of her. Valentina notices Carmen’s scarf and realizes that David overheard Carmen and assumed that it was her who was sleeping with someone else. She is disappointed in David for not trusting her. She had just been out of a toxic relationship and didn’t need to be in another one, especially when she hadn’t even seen David. She breaks up with David and leaves the apartment to spend the night at Carmen’s.
What Happened In David’s Past?
Following his heartbreak over Valentina, David goes through a box of his pictures and videos of his childhood sweetheart, Maria. Turns out that in his adulthood, he was engaged to Maria, who was also Nacho’s older sister. Nacho and David had been childhood friends as well. However, before David and Maria could get married, she died for unknown reasons. David had known Maria for his entire life, and losing her broke his heart. As a result, he became reclusive and refrained from losing his apartment at all. He dedicated his entire time to creating children’s games to escape the grief of losing his lover. For the three years since the tragedy, David barely left the apartment until Valentina moved next door.
Do David And Valentina Meet Each Other?
On the day of Valentina’s audition, David steps out and finds his store being shut down due to poor sales. Nacho, who looks after David’s stores, confesses to David that he never told him about the situation, fearing that this news would make David feel worse. However, Nacho notices that David is acting strange, and when asked, he reveals that he is no longer on speaking terms with Valentina. Nacho advises him not to let go of this woman, as this was the first time in a long time that Nacho actually saw David happy. Resonating with Nacho’s advice, he decides to attend her audition. Later, during Valentina’s performance, David immediately tells her that she is out of touch. He sneaks backstage and calls out to her to encourage her to make use of her emotions. David knows what he’s doing is quite outrageous, but he wants her to be angry so that she can put it in her performance.
Before she can play any better, the judge asks for the next contestant. However, Valentina does not leave. Instead, she performs a song that she wrote herself. This song not only mesmerizes the judge but also makes David happy to hear that Valentina has accepted her own identity as a musician. After the performance, when Oscar approaches her about more auditions, she turns him down for good and clarifies that she wants to pursue her own music. Coming to terms with her true self, Valentina heads back to her apartment to talk to David. David apologizes to her for meddling in her life. He clarifies that he actually trusts her, even though he doesn’t trust a lot of people, and that she made him want to step out of the house again. Overwhelmed by her feelings for David, Valentina begins to break down the wall that separates them. David follows her lead and proceeds to gradually break the wall down too. As Valentina and David finally see each other for the first time, Valentina crosses over to David’s apartment and kisses him.
Love, Divided ends with a feel-good conclusion about second chances in life. Both Valentina and David had been in the grasp of their own individual adversities. But ever since they met each other, even with a bitter start, David and Valentina started to open up and see a brighter future again.
