Shots in the dark - 'Barcelona,' the movie - Column

Interview, August, 1994 by Graham Fuller

Barcelona: a delightfully cool breeze

The high summer of Hollywood infantilism is about to give way to the dog days of Natural Born Killers and the red winds of Pulp Fiction and Killing Zoe. In need of a tranquil breeze, you'll welcome Whit Stillman's Barcelona, a film as cool as anything from the Quentin Tarantino stable, but for entirely different reasons. It's not Stillman's subject matter--two truculent, callow young American men negotiating love and xenophobia in Spain--or his naturalistic style that makes the movie so appealing. Rather, it's the insouciance of his storytelling, the lightness of his touch. There is no huff and puff in his work, no visible effort, though love and bombs go off and people experience watershed moments. If Stillman were a tennis player, you'd talk about his flicks of the wrist or his deft backhand lobs.

As a filmmaker, Stillman is a miniaturist with a restrained palette. His previous movie, Metropolitan (1990), was a low-lit, low-key comedy of manners about a group of New York preppies and the less affluent youth (Edward Clements) they befriend one Christmas. Although influenced by F. Scott Fitzgerald, it more closely approximates the work-free world of Jane Austen transplanted to young, hermetic haute bourgeois Manhattan--elitist, superficially charming, but rife with back-biting and betrayal. Its nominal heroine, Audrey (sensitively played by Carolyn Farina, who was, appropriately, en route to Scorsese's Age of Innocence), echoes Mansfield Park's Fanny Price and is the film's one truly likable character. Her circle is made up of prigs, flakes, snobs, and narcissists, yet, with the exception of the odious society rake, Von Sloneker, they resemble any other group of unformed young adults who think they know more than they do. Stillman's anthropological, fly-on-the-wall approach neither patronizes nor ridicules them. They may be privileged, but it doesn't follow that their feelings and opinions are contemptible.

Two of these characters, pontificating Charlie (Taylor Nichols) and arrogant Nick (Chris Eigeman), reemerge, for all intents and purposes, as Barcelona's zealous sales executive, Ted (Nichols), and his feckless cousin Fred (Eigeman), who has invited himself to stay at Ted's apartment. The movie is set during the early '80s, when Spanish sentiment ran high against NATO and America's self-appointed role as world policeman; its opening montage depicts terrorist attacks against U.S. targets in Barcelona. Fred, whose uniform marks him as a fascist in the eyes of the locals and his behavior as a bloody-minded provocateur, quickly disrupts uptight Ted's diplomacy with his Spanish friends and his quest to find a girlfriend among various trade-fair employees.

What makes the film succeed is the way Stillman draws the political into the personal, and vice versa, without relinquishing the wit, urbanity, and rhythmic grace that characterized Metropolitan. In Barcelona, he sets up a dance-like confusion of sexual relationships--or temporary alliances. Ted gets involved with Montserrat (Tushka Bergen) and Fred with Marta (Mira Sorvino), both of whom are also sleeping with Ramon, a glib playboy journalist who has written a series of anti-American articles. When Monserrat lets slip at a party that Ramon sleeps around because he cannot perform with any woman he knows well, Fred seizes on the admission like a born sophist: "That's terrible! Poor guy. . . . But it explains a lot. . . . I think it's well-known that anti-Americanism has its roots in sexual impotence. At least in Europe."

This is just the kind of delightfully fallacious reasoning that Nick used to vilify Von Sloneker's philandering in Metropolitan. In both cases, the Chris Eigeman character plays a game of slippery Oedipal one-upmanship; in Barcelona, he uses America's military heft to ridicule his girlfriend's occasional lover. At the same party, Ted becomes furious at Ramon for suggesting that the Americans themselves were responsible for a recent bombing of the USO building in which an American sailor died. Ted is politically better informed than Fred, but his hostility toward Ramon is also personal: He wants Montserrat to leave the older man and move in with him. Shortly afterward, during another political discussion at Ramon's country retreat, Fred embarrasses Ted and alienates the girls by a symbolic act of hawkishness. If we're in any doubt that Stillman is making Fred and Ted's sexual insecurities the subtext of their outraged nationalism, he playfully has them analyze that very word while they're walking to work one morning.

Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown, while appreciative of Barcelona in her Cannes report, suggested that Stillman is a "neocon." On the face of his two films so far, the writer-director's concerns are unreservedly upper-middle-class, in keeping with his own background, yet the characters in his films are scarcely ciphers or mouthpieces. We may grow to sympathize with Ted and Fred during Barcelona, especially when the latter is attacked by terrorists, but as right-wing blowhards they are borderline pathetic. They are highly watchable characters, because of, not despite, their asperity. "Ted is such a fink," Stillman has said. If there is autobiographical content here, then there is also healthy self-criticism. Even Ramon is not quite what he seems--and none of the women are, although their status in Stillman's work is problematic. Marta moves from sweet plausibility to duplicity; most of the other "cool trade-fair girls" are set up as ripe for plucking. There is the sense, however, that Stillman (not unlike Hal Hartley in his films) is constantly reassessing his attitude toward women, and it's to his credit that Barcelona's romantic resolutions are wholly unexpected.