Innocents Abroad

Whereas Hollywood and the Independent film market have spent the last few years churning out films that painstakingly stage "spontaneous" interaction between the members of regional communities, this documentary follows the average American on a whirlwind tour of Europe, observing with great sensitivity and humor, how the "beast" (as portrayed in mockumentaries) reacts to new situations. Blank takes care to show a rounded perspective of this type of trip, complete with observations from European tour guides, chefs, vendors and others who are used to hosting these groups. Where films like Drop Dead Gorgeous try to play on the "backwards/backwoods" Midwestern communities, Blank is not sympathetic or mocking, he simply stands back and lets the characters speak for themselves. Any comedy or human interest lover would enjoy this film.

This is not my mode of travel at all, to be in a large tour group covering 22 cities in 10 countries in 14 days, but as always Les Blank gives us a friendly window into an area of human recreation, and this was gently entertaining. You can tell that Blank is good natured about people, even those who hadn't done a lot of travel before, but I couldn't help but chuckle at how he juxtaposed an American spouting exceptionalist views with a German bartender's blistering take:

American: "I think they (Europeans) kind of envy us, in a way. Because of our freedom, our wealth. And the fact that we are just from America."

German: "We laugh about them across here sometimes, you know, not just the Germans, but every European laughs about the Americans sometimes, because they're not as cultured, definitely not as we mid-Europeans are. Their manners, their food; they're narrow-minded."

He also shows the tour group leader making this remarkably prescient observation:

"Mass tourism is a new feature of life. It's only really in the 1960s that it really got under way, and what's done that is cheap air travel. But I don't see any way in which it can fail to affect the environment with mass tourism. ... when a group of 40 people, just by their very existence, change the character of a place, it's rather like scientists observing some scientific process, the observer always influences that which he observes. And it worries me sometimes."

It's a wide mix of tourists, some more open-minded than others, but all having fun while doing the things tourists do, the things we laugh about unless it's we who are being the tourists. Maybe the most poignant was the American who had bombed the German city he was now visiting a few decades earlier during the war.

It was interesting to compare this mode of travel to the type Rick Steves was popularizing on PBS around this time, and to see some familiar sights. Oh, and while I haven't read the Mark Twain book that the title comes from, his book A Tramp Abroad about his travels in Europe is a great read, and a testament to the eternal culture clash between Americans and Europeans.

This documentary is a lighthearted look at several Americans from all different states and all different backgrounds take a bus tour through the major European cities.

It's fun to see how they react to different cultures. The documentary does not make fun of them in anyway shape or from. It's just a refreshing look at how outsiders perceive the culture they are in. The tour operators and guides are extremely kind and accommodating.

Just an interesting documentary that looks at tourism from both sides.