BARCELONA
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
In his 1968 Iberia, James Michener wrote, "To travel across Spain and finally reach Barcelona is like drinking a respectable red wine and finishing up with a bottle of champagne." From the late 80s, especially since the Olympics of '92, and right up to the present, it's even truer: Barcelona is the quintessential European metropolis, an optimum Paris on the Mediterranean complete with its own Eiffel Tower -- Gaudi's magnificently eclectic El Templo de la Sagrada Familia. Updating, Michener would call Spain's intellectual and publishing center the Dom Perignon of the continent. From atop the Muntanya de Montjuic, Barcelona is deceptive in scale -- an urban Guanajuato. Traversing by foot or subway, it's so continually a picturesque surprise of spacious, manicured boulevards, centuries-old narrow-street neighborhoods, endless architectural delights that you bemoan the egregious lack of movie maker appreciation. And anyone who's been there knows that it deserves much better than what Whit Stillman gives us in his BARCELONA. Putting it as mildly as I can: Stillman should be required to rename it -- to BARFALONA.
BARCELONA isn't a movie about the city or its dwellers; it's about two snot-nosed American cousins pretending to be Woody Allen Reaganites foisting puffed-up, bogus Hemingway on any Barcelonan as Eurotrash who'll consent to listen. Does director-writer Stillman have a case of the hates against the city he claims to love? Rhetorical question: the city dwellers in general are treated with contempt and the city is never photographed to show its true metropolitan flavor, or show off, however fleetingly, its renowned symbols: Las Ramblas and Gaudi's gaudy masterpieces. Shortly into this yupchucker one of these two asinine Americans whines about the lack of Barcelonian appreciation for Americans having died ridding Europe of fascism. What Stillman never mentions is that while America -- along with its allies, of course -- rid Europe of Hitler and Mussolini, Spain was left in the grips of fascism until Franco's death in 1975. But Stillman, who lived in Barcelona for several years and married a resident, has no respect for his host's history: he repeatedly swacks Barcelonians over their heads for their anti-Americanism, which he sees as insulting ingratitude and uses it as a form of ersatz self-righteousness. Lovers of Barcelona know where Stillman's head is -- up his a double s.
The cousins are played as well as they're directed, which is to say that there's no faulting how they perform the numbskulls Stillman penned for them. (Is there any way to trust a writer who names one of his characters Montserrat?) Taylor Nichols, as a salesman based in Barcelona, has the cutie boy charm of Casper Weinberger, Orson Bean and Judith Light's husband, actor Robert Desiderio. You don't believe a word he says except about his fears of losing his job -- and the only reason you believe that is because you don't buy for a minute he'd be an effective salesman for anything. He does have one asset that not only betrays his insecure character but is more European than anything else in the movie: his seductive swagger of a walk. (He'd make a sensational aristocratic misogynist.) His cousin, played by Chris Eigeman, is more closely related to E!'s Michael Castner. You have to wonder how it could ever be that the U.S. Navy would send this jerk to Barcelona as an advance man to test the "welcome waters." Of course, the Navy wouldn't, but that's Stillman's problem. Only once is there something about the character that rings true: when he mimic's Benjamin's howls of "Elaine! Elaine!" from THE GRADUATE. Clear and away the only amusing bit in the entire movie.
BARCELONA is such a crock that Stillman postulates the city's women became sexually revolutionized in the early 80s. Nonsense. The liberalization of sexual mores actually began in the mid 60s, when German and Swede Suecas came down to the sunny beaches of Spain's Costa del Sol and bounced around topless to the delight of the Spanish male population. Though it took Franco's death to unleash their own sexual assertiveness and independence, Spanish women consented to sex without commitment or the burdens of Catholic guilt long before it became publicly fashionable.
Can you believe there are critics out there who, in one breath, think Stillman has an attitudinal resemblance to Henry James, and in the next breath claim he's a combo of Bunuel and wacky Almodovar? No forgiveness for that. Speaking to a reporter, Stillman used the following as his own excuse: "By being kind of square you can get into material that isn't open to other people. I feel square -- insulated from the cool." Detesting Stillman's prissified attitudes, vehemently objecting to his indulgent insistence on confirming why there's a steady drumbeat of anti-Americanism, isn't the same as calling him an incompetent numbers cruncher: in fact, it takes a very competent economist to make a movie that looks like BARCELONA for just over $3 million. That what's captured is thoroughly inadequate to measure the city's romanticism and sensuous grace (even his panoramas are too short to absorb the pleasures), Stillman, if he doesn't sell out to Hollywood's money spending mania, could help deflate the spiraling costs of movie making. That's the best I can say about him, because, considering his Reaganesque context -- that is, creating illusions by disposing of fact -- Stillman's the type who would likely trick us into believing there's a nimbus of virtue surrounding the Valley of the Fallen. (Just what Ronnie tried at Bitburg.) As for Barcelona, well, it has two options: Sue Stillman for defamation or deny him re-entry. Both should be exercised.
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