Barcelona

"Barcelona" is a conversational movie, driven by witty, inventive dialogue. The two main protagonists are cousins; white collar, American, male twenty-somethings. One is the Barcelona sales representative of an American company, the other a recently arrived Naval attaché. Set in the early 1980s, together they navigate the Spanish singles scene while trying to excel in their chosen professions. This doesn't sound like much, but it's really a hoot. The movie's core is the pair's verbal jousting, both with one another, and with the Spanish women they try to woo. It has a couple of sub-plots to keep things interesting, and just bubbles along. I recommend this highly, especially as a movie to see with a date.

Two nervous young American cousins stationed in Barcelona adapt to a world in which the privilege of being American offers little peace of mind, and where a dearth of evidence, sympathy and understanding prevents any moral or cultural justification of their own way of life.

The young men (one based on Stillman himself), find themselves living the lives of grown men -- doing the work of men, traveling, attracting and bedding grown, worldly women, but they are far from understanding the responsibility of mind and heart that goes along with it. Whit Stillman again chooses bland, thin young actors, MODELS on which to "hang" this movie, as though it were an expensive gown-- the same could be said of THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO, and METROPOLITAN, his first film.

Keeping the camera always at a moderate, comfortable distance from the cast, he effectively prohibits the viewer from making any real connection with the characters -- leading many to write his movies off as "shallow." This technique robs the movie of some important emotion, but Stillman seems more interested in teaching than entertaining. He has another, alternate, and very possibly superior definition of "meat" in storytelling. Stillman resists the use of a bevy of seduction tools like over-editing, music, and "romance" -- a decision that leads, in the end, to a seductive style similar Italo Calvino's brash artlessness in storytelling.

Though the movie is full of "thoughts," the characters nevertheless find themselves REACTING their way, thoughtlessly, toward adulthood. It's torturous to watch these characters grope, solipsize and mis-calculate, but (we must decide eventually), one does not have to enjoy a film in order that it be excellent and instructive -- BARCELONA is.

Watching the film, one feels the frustration of everyone involved, from the writer/director to the key grip -- to me, commiserating with this immense, well-worded frustration/triumph seems a valuable way to spend 104 minutes, counting previews.

Barecelona is a vastly underrated movie that achieved little success outside of art-house theatres on its release. This is a shame because the movie is both intelligent, funny and has broad appeal.

It concerns the adventures of two Americans who find themselves in Barcelona in the early Eighties at the height of the cold war. Ted is an uptight and repressed businessman while Fred is his airforce cousin who's a great deal more relaxed. The film starts with Fred forcing himself on his reluctant cousin's hospitality having just arrived in Barcelona.

Yet this isn't a buddy movie. In fact, it's very hard to classify and is by no means typical of an American movie. It's far more European in style.

The movie is about clashes of cultures and it's here that the humour is generated. Fred and Ted's differing attitudes and intelligence levels rub up against each other, and the old debate about the differences between male and female outlooks get a look in too. But the largest culture clash is that of urban left-wing Northern Spain versus the naturally conservative and bullish Americanism. This sounds heavy and intellectual but it isn't - the film makes fun of the American culture of living according self-help guides, for example, but also makes fun of a Spanish journalist-cum-philosopher who turns out to be equally shallow.

The strongest elements of the movie are the script, which is as tight as any top-notch sitcom, and also the cast. There are some excellent performances all around from some very strong actors. Fans or Mira Sorvino won't get to see a great deal of her, however, as she has a relatively minor supporting role.

The film is effectively a celebration of Barcelona and also of the situations that arise when different cultures meet. This might make it hard for some Americans to warm to but, ironically, that merely underlines the movie's main theme - that the world is bigger than the American continent and infinitely wider in its cultural scope.

During the 1980s, at the height of the Cold War, two American cousins and childhood friends, who are now a businessman and a naval officer (played by Taylor Nichols and Chris Eigeman) get to live some time in Barcelona, where they face (but finally overcome) the political distrust of many Spaniards. Director Whit Stillman lived some time in Spain and he surely based part of the movie on his own experiences. The movie is fine skewing the unthinking Antiamericanism of Europe's intellectual class (though Stillman is too much of a gentleman to be too biting in his criticism). Sometimes the dialogue is foolish when it tries to be witty (as when the Americans try to explain to some Spaniards the greatness of Hamburgers) but mostly the screenplay is quite fine. Stillman is an interesting filmmaker if only because his preppy conservative point of view is not often showed on movies. Mira Sorvino plays one of the Spanish girls in one of her earlier roles.

Back when I wasn't really into buying films on video, I bought this one. The humor is subtle, understated, ironic, and tremendously well-written. It is just ending as I write this. Every time I see it I notice a few more things that make me laugh. None of it is the shocking, laugh-out-loud style of humor, but there are several intellectual chuckles.

For some people, it will seem too intellectual and therefore it will strike them as pretentious. That is not a criticism at all, only a warning. I don't find it pretentious at all.

The best part is the interesting characters. They are written as complete, well-developed people who have wildly different outlooks on Spain-U.S. relations. While Whit Stillman does a great job of analyzing these relations, the central focus of the movie is how these characters relate to each other in the arena of these larger ethnic relations.

I firmly believe that anyone who enjoys dialogue-driven, non-action-oriented films will love this one. I gave it a "10."