Barcelona

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.]

This is one of those movies that get better with age. I first saw it ten years ago, when Mira Sorvino was an unknown actress, and I was surprised to learn later that she wasn't really Spanish. (I lived in Spain for five years, so I'm not easily fooled.) If you've been to Barcelona, you'll like the glowing glimpses of the city, sun-drenched during the day, lit by neon and fireworks at night. There is much charming, often subtle, humor in the film. Who could resist Taylor Nichols dancing alone in his dining room while reading the Bible? Or Chris Eigeman using a felt tip pen to change anti-American graffiti from "American pigs" to "American deer"? Sure, the film is talky, but it doesn't take itself too too seriously.

"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.

IMDb's intro to this movie starts "Ted, a stuffy white guy from Illinois working in sales", and there, right away, we have the problem. If you're an arrested child, who thinks that the idea of working in sales equals death, and that considering the consequences of your actions equals "stuffy", then I expect you will hate this film. But for the rest of us, it's a breath of fresh air.

Other people have said what's appealing about it --- the unexpected zigs and zags of the story, the amusing (though not laugh-out-loud funny) dialog, the portrayal of a dynamic between two guys that's touching without ever being cloying. But for me what I enjoyed was the (depressingly rare) chance to see people acting as adults.

It is nice to see someone who takes their job seriously and tries hard to do well at it, rather than concentrating all his energy on goofing off and avoiding the boss. (This goes for both Fred and Ted.) It's nice to see people thinking seriously about what is and is not working in their romantic lives and how to fix it. It's nice to see people not relying on ridiculous clichés about fate and destiny as the solutions to all their problems.

Meanwhile, on the other side, it's nice to see all this seriousness but in a movie populated by basically decent people, people you don't hate, in a movie that isn't ramming some sort of absurdly non-subtle message down your throat ala most indie cinema.

I'm pretty impatient with movies. I'd say 70% of the movies I watch, after 10 minutes I switch it off because the movie has in no way captured my interest. I haven't laughed, I haven't been surprised, all I've seen is the same old **** I've seen a million times before. Maybe it's the husband and wife fighting with each other. Maybe it's the "those were the days" kids playing. Maybe it's the nerdish guy being belittled by other people at work. You know what I mean --- five minutes into the movie and you know the stereotypes every character fits, and exactly how it will all play out.

What so appealed to me about this movie is how (without "twists" or gimmicks) it doesn't follow that path. The primary characters kept growing and revealing new aspects to their characters throughout the movie in a way that's all too rare. Give it a chance!

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.