Barcelona

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.

"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.

There are people in this world who think "Barcelona" is just a film about soft-living, navel-gazing preppies with perfect hair and term-paper vocabularies. These are the same people who like Vinyl Hampton music.

What's not to love about this sensitive, off-kilter love story about a young, too-earnest salesman Ted and his sly, disruptive Ugly American cousin-with-issues Fred? Nothing. The film grabs you from their first bickering exchange in Ted's apartment building, and never lets go, not because of fast-paced editing or shiny visuals (though the film doesn't drag and Barcelona at night is a wonder) but because of the clever dialogue. Whit Stillman makes films for people who love to read, yet they are not stilted exercises in "Masterpiece Theater"-style draftsmanship but laugh-out-loud exchanges of opinion between engaging people who just happen to see the world in sometimes very/ sometimes slightly different ways. It's like "Friends" if that cast suddenly grew brains. Give this movie five minutes, and it will suck you in like a vacuum.

Ultimately, what grabs me is how the film is so chock full of life, of people who haven't got much of a clue about life winging it and hazarding the consequences. I remember those days. Ted pledges to date "only plain or even homely women" because he thinks beauty obscures the true essence of love. Fred tells people his cousin is into the Marquis de Sade and leather underwear because he thinks it makes Ted more interesting to the ladies than the Bible-reading goody-goody Ted really is.

Actually, Fred may be on to something. It seems to help Ted in meeting his dream woman Montserrat. Ted and Montserrat are an odd couple. He wrestles earnestly with his religion and believes in salesmanship as a means of understanding life, while she is a free-living, free-loving Spaniard who thinks leaving her native land for America will condemn her future children to a life of hamburger-eating zombiedom.

I was in Barcelona in 1981 myself and saw first-hand how beautiful and magical the place truly is. I also saw the anti-Americanism and anti-"OTAN"ism prevalent there. Stillman isn't overselling the negative attitudes many in Spain and throughout Europe had of the United States during those critical days of the Cold War. It's a good thing they got that out of their system, huh? The movie could have been heavy-handed in this way, but never allows itself to be, not with all those funny ant analogies. Ramon, the left-wing writer who fingers Fred for being a member of the CIA (or the AFL-CIA, as Ramon is convinced the labor union and the intelligence agency are somehow connected), is not stupid or mean, but just like Ted and Fred, a little too caught up in his own ideas of how things are, or as Ted puts it in a moment of truth at the hospital, another person given to filtering reality through his own colossal egotism.

Whit Stillman seems to be averaging two films a decade now, and it's a shame. He and Chris Eigeman need to make more movies together. I never get tired of Eigeman's snarky charm, or Stillman's ability to create films equally rich in one-liners and in context. "Barcelona" was the finest of Stillman's three efforts, with the best story and backdrop, but the earlier "Metropolitan" was not far behind. "Last Days of Disco," the most recent Stillman film, wasn't as good as the first two, but is engaging and absorbing enough on its own terms. If you haven't seen any of them, start with this one.

[The DVD contains several interesting deleted scenes and an alternative ending which might have made the film a bit darker but wouldn't have disrupted anything essential. Still, it's hard to argue with an ending that has Montserrat bite into an authentic American hamburger and pronounce it "incredible." At least unless you're a vegetarian, in which case Fred would probably say that's your problem.]

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."

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.