Barcelona. - movie reviews

National Review, Sept 12, 1994 by John Simon

WE TEND to look to the independents for a relief from the majors, but, in film, the minor leaguers have their own ways of letting us down. Two of them are currently garnering good reviews even as they flounder with their admittedly off-beat material, which, to my view, sticks more in the craw than in the consciousness.

In 1990, Whit Stillman made a bit of a stir with Metropolitan, a comedy about the trivial traumas of debutantes and their escorts on the Park Avenue--Southampton axis. It seemed refreshing to have a young filmmaker who was unabashedly chronicling the tribulations of well-heeled WASPs rather than the aches and rages of various other minorities. Yet Metropolitan looked rather more impoverished than its subject matter warranted, and its invention was, at best, spotty. But Mr. Stillman was clearly his own man, possessed of a somewhat uneven but amiably idiosyncratic sense of humor.

He still is that with Barcelona, a comedy about two cousins who had a huge row at age ten, which pops up occasionally in flashback and adds little to the story. Now Ted is a sales rep from a Chicago company in Barcelona, where he is suddenly descended upon by cousin Fred, a junior naval officer here as an advance man for the Sixth Fleet. The time is the last decade of the Cold War, and NATO and Americans are powerfully unpopular in Spain, even though liberated young Spanish women put out for them rather liberally.

What Mr. Stillman has is a good situation, but no story. The movie is composed of slightly flaccid blackout skits, each of which could easily have been summed up by a New Yorker cartoon. The screenplay, if that is the word for it, tries to connect them, as if they were so many points in one of those by-the-numbers drawings to be joined by a counting pencil. But no picture emerges: the points could just as well have been random spots on a blank wall.

Ted tries to get rid of Fred, but Fred stays on and on. They bicker; they philosophize about feminine beauty, the tactics of salesmanship, and America's presence in Europe; and they do not really do much of anything. Ted works in a nice Art Nouveau office, but it is not clear at what; what Fred might possibly be accomplishing for the Navy is they amble around Barcelona a lot, which is a pretty sight but gets us nowhere; at night, they go to jazz concerts, drink, dance, and debate with some fetching Spanish girls, and eventually go to bed with them, even though most of the girls have steady Spanish boyfriends. The chitchat between the cousins is sometimes amusing; the conversations and arguments between the Americans and Spaniards are less so, though they have a mild ironic edge. And every once in a while there is a spurt of political violence.

The few authentic Hispanics in the film speak an English that is barely comprehensible and grating; the girls, however, played by Americans with more or less convincing Spanish accents (mostly less), are easy on the eye, but no more believable than Ted and Fred. The views from a passing car of the Cathedral lit up at night A are about as exciting as the movie gets. When someone hovers between life and death--or survival as a vegetable--we do not much care. Even at their best, these characters do little more than vegetate, though, unlike other household plants, you do not have to talk to them: they talk your head off.

To say that these superficial shadow-characters remain unexplored is a gross understatement. But nothing else is explored either: even a key theft is never satisfactorily cleared up. Money matters are treated in a particularly cavalier and vague manner, which may give the film a certain raffish insouciance. And there are some funny situations and intermittently funny lines. Barcelona also looks less home-movieish than Metropolitan. It is, however, even more disjointed.

The acting is not especially good or bad, but entirely apposite. Chris Eigeman, as Fred, may overdo the wide-eyed but unseeing stare in what would otherwise be an apt blend of self-righteousness and one-upmanship. He is droll the way the young Jack Nicholson used to be, but without his charm. Taylor Nichols is better as Ted, a sort of sophisticated nerd looking like a younger, gentrified Robert Duvall. The main girls, Tushka Bergen and Mira Sorvino, are attractive and likable, but have virtually nothing to do. Barcelona is the work of a clever, upbeat smartass, but hardly an artist. Though Mr. Stillman has spent some time in that city, and his American wife lived there even longer, the film could as readily have been made by a casual tourist; the great Catalan capital deserves better than that. But Mr. Stillman is consistent, flattening out his backgrounds as thoroughly as he does his characters.