July 29, 1994
BARCELONA is the second movie (and first studio movie) by writer/director Whit Stillman, following up on his Oscar nominated low budget debut, METROPOLITAN (1990). I love his 1998 film THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO, which is considered part of a loose trilogy with these two (and has some overlapping characters), but if I ever saw these other two it was a long time ago and I don’t really remember them. So I guess I’m going in backwards order.
Stillman is one of those true originals, he has his own thing that he does really well and nobody else is much like him. His movies are very light on plot, very heavy on dialogue, and almost entirely about self absorbed, Ivy League educated yuppie dorks, and yet I find the experience light and funny and not grating. This is in part because he also has a very distinct humor and tone and somehow gets these finely tuned performances that deliver it just right. One of his secret weapons is Chris Eigeman (unaired Red Dwarf USA pilot), who plays different characters in all of them, always with the absolute perfect wide-eyed sense of outrage at the stupidest shit. In LAST DAYS OF DISCO I highlighted when he got upset about someone’s interpretation of LADY AND THE TRAMP – in this one my favorite is when he sees anti-American graffiti and says “They’re calling us pigs. That’s meant to hurt!”
Ted (Taylor Nichols, later in CONGO) is the narrator, an American salesman living in Barcelona, who tells us he’s furious, but just presents as annoyed, when his cousin Fred (Eigeman) shows up at his door. Fred is a naval officer arriving early “to smooth things out and make sure nothing goes wrong” during an upcoming fleet visit. When Ted implies he doesn’t have enough tact for the job, Fred doesn’t argue, he just says, “Well, it doesn’t require that much tact.”
He’s the kind of guy who walks around town in his uniform, some punk mutters “facha” (fascist) at him, and later he keeps talking it up like it was a major incident. Referring to it as “all that happened tonight” and saying “we had a very close call back there. It could’ve turned really ugly. They obviously didn’t mean ‘facha’ in the positive sense.”
So this is a movie about cousins who grew up together and sort of hate each other spending time together. It’s also about falling in love. Ted claims he’s decided to stop dating beautiful women, but Fred scoffs at him like he’s an idiot, and Ted can’t help but give tips about where “the cool trade fair girls go” (I’m not sure what that means) and pretty soon they’re going to discos and meeting women together. They hang out with Monsterrat (Tushka Bergen, who’s in MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME!) and Marta (Mira Sorvino, NEW YORK COP) and Fred convinces them that Ted is really into S&M and wearing leather straps under his clothes, which seems to impress them.
It’s difficult to precisely describe the humor here, but it’s very specific. These guys are really full of hot air and the Spanish women don’t really react to their bullshit, seem neither impressed or judgmental. A big laugh for me is when Ted asks Monsterrat, “You know how at parties people always talk about marketing?” and she just says very matter of factly, “No. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone talk about marketing.” Later, Fred, a jazz hater, tries to go full David Addison on a party, changes a record and tries to get everyone to join him in a limbo contest. In most movies they would seem put off at first but reluctantly join in and unleash their inner limbomaniacs – here they stare blankly until Stillman offers Fred the mercy of cutting to a different scene. As Ted later says about dating women from other countries, “When we act in ways which might objectively seem asshole-ish, or incredibly annoying, they don’t get upset at all. They don’t take it personally. They just assume it’s some national characteristic.”
One kinda funny twist is when Ted and Monsterrat are having an intimate conversation about her life, how he reminds her of Ramon, a teacher she had an affair with when she was 16. Only after she tells all about Ramon’s career as a writer and their relationship until he told her to start see other men does Ted understand that she is in fact still with this guy and lives with him. Whoops.
Later at a party Ramon (Pep Munné) is surrounded by women, talking a bunch of political shit about the Americans, and Ted should really just stay out of it but he can’t because he hears him talking about the foreign policy sins of a nefarious group called “the AFL-CIA.”
The international tensions are real. There are some explosions in this movie, a death, a serious wounding. But they’re mostly just texture and context for a witty, dry relationship comedy. By no stretch of the imagination does it ever turn into a thriller. It would be funny if Miramax released it though, they would’ve made a pretty funny trailer. (Instead it was Fine Line Features, who previously gave us EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES.)
Visually it’s a simple movie, but nicely shot. Cinematographer John Thomas got his start with Stillman on METROPOLITAN. One of the two movies he did in between was WITCHCRAFT III: THE KISS OF DEATH.
Intellectually I can imagine why someone might hate Stillman’s movies. They’re pretty much just hanging out with people I wouldn’t want to hang out with in life, and you can’t really say it’s a biting satire of these type of people. The reason Stillman knows them so well is because he’s one of them. His great-great-grandfather founded Brownsville, Texas, birthplace of Kris Kristofferson. His dad was the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs under John F. Kennedy. His godfather, E. Digby Baltzell, is credited with popularizing the term “WASP.” He majored in history at Harvard and reviewed theater for The Harvard Crimson. This trilogy is inspired by different times in his life, this one coming from a few years he spent in Madrid and Barcelona as an agent selling films to Spanish-language TV in the U.S. So what do you know, this kinda qualifies for the common summer ’94 theme of boomer nostalgia.
But I think it works because it’s very self-deprecating. I don’t think he wants us to judge his characters, but he doesn’t want us to be impressed by them either, and there’s never a request for pity. We just get to chuckle at their pomposity and lack of self awareness and hope they don’t bother anyone too much.
Since BARCELONA only cost $3.2 million it was profitable in theaters, and I’m sure most people saw it on video. It’s now in the Criterion Collection along with the rest of the trilogy. Stillman has only done three movies since, and a little bit of TV (including an episode of Homicide: Life On the Street featuring Eigeman), but he’s still trying to cook things up. He was last reported to be working on a “big budget rom-com adventure TV” show called The Splendid Affinities, “a series set across Paris, Madrid and London.”
August 1st, 2024 at 11:19 am
This movie is responsible for the line:
Katharine Ross has just married this really cool guy – tall, blond, incredibly popular, the make-out king of his fraternity in Berkeley – when this obnoxious Dustin Hoffman character shows up at the back of the church, acting like a total asshole.
In Eigeman’s precise delivery, entering my head every time I try to watch The Graduate
(the movie is also responsible for one of the worst dates I’ve ever been on. My companion could not understand how I could find a movie with such stilted dialog/delivery, featuring characters that were so unlikable/stupid to be so funny. And I guess wanted me to justify my laughter, almost seeming angry about it)