Director Whit Stillman is one of the many notable auteurs to have arisen during the indie boom of the 1990s, and may be placed in a matrix with other conversation-centric indie directors like Richard Linklater, Noah Baumbach, Neil LaBute, and Kevin Smith. Stillman, like said contemporaries, has a unique voice that can be almost immediately identified. His characters tend to be talky, writerly, smarter-than-they-are-wise, socially awkward, self-obsessed yuppie antiheroes that viewers, despite it all, come away liking. Stillman frequently operates within a post-post-college malaise wherein young people – usually in their late 20s – are just beginning to emerge from the comforting cocoon of intellectual banter and enter the terrifyingly workaday universe of neuroses. Stillman’s films tend to be about that magical moment when you realize people might actually start calling you on your shit.
Barcelona (1994) is the second of a trilogy of films that Stillman refers to as his Comedies of Mannerlessness (The first was 1990’s Metropolitan, the third was 1998’s The Last Days of Disco). Barcelona, based loosely on events on Stillman’s own life, follows a pair of cousins and their professional, conversational, and romantic misadventures in early ’80s Spain, right when anti-American sentiment was running at its highest. Ted (Taylor Nichols) is the tightly-wound neurotic who, at the film’s outset, announces that he will only date homely girls exclusively, as the pretty ones don’t seem to offer him any sort of actual emotional stability. No points for guessing that he’ll end up falling for a pretty girl (Tushka Bergen). His cousin Fred (Chris Eigeman) is a naval officer and an aspiring layabout who casually fibs and has a tendency to get too involved in political conversations at inopportune moments. He’s still handsome and charming enough, however, to begin a casual affair with Marta (Mira Sorvino).
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On paper, these two young men are insufferable. Ted is snippy, over-sensitive, self-pitying, and tunnel-visioned. Fred is paranoid, dishonest, boorish, rude, and smarmy. They’re like co-workers you hate. Stillman, however, brilliantly allows them to emerge as intelligent and oddly charming people. Ted and Fred are ignorant and culturally clumsy to say the least, but they aren’t dumb. Even if they often say dumb things. They traverse the parties of Barcelona seeking casual flings and/or romance, and seem at ease with letting their skittish personality flaws read to the locals as exotic foreign idiosyncrasies. Meanwhile, the locals, experiencing a dramatic political upheaval, blissfully move through a state of sexual and conversational liberation that our two American leads seem to be openly baffled by.
The ultimate impact of Barcelona is gentle, if it even registers. For the amount of time the film spends discussing politics, you can tell that actual politics were very far from Stillman’s mind when he wrote it. His comments about Americans abroad, then, ring more universal. When we’re in our own country, we can gloss over our own nervousness with an urban haze of activity. Abroad, we are aliens. And when we’re working our way through our own youthful, blind, post-college obliviousness, the surrounding culture will listen, but they won’t buy it.
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What Barcelona does have, however, is a slew of great moments, and innumerable well-written zingers. Stillman’s dialogue is a delight, and it’s fun to hear smart people, yet ignorant ones, volley. The characters banter, rib, lie, and make deadpan cracks to one another at a speedy – yet bearable – pace. To cite some of my favorites: “You are far weirder than someone merely into S&M. At least they have a tradition. We have some idea what S&M is about. There’s movies and books about it. But so far as I know, there is nothing to explain the way you are.” Or: “Positive thinking is fine in theory. But whenever I try it on a systematic basis, I end up really depressed.” Or, on the shooting deaths in America, Fred says that Americans aren’t any more violent than other people, “We’re just better shots.”
Barcelona, ultimately, functions best when taken as a piece with Stillman’s other films. By itself, it’s fine, but it feels wispy and incomplete; it’s so structurally loose and easily diverted by subplots that it seems to forget what it was talking about. Of the three films in its purported trilogy (now available in a Criterion box set), it may even be the least. When gathered with its immediate spiritual neighbors in the Stillman canon, though, one can see a grander social comment at work. Stillman sees, with a great deal of clarity, how youthful selfishness tends to shape us for the worse, but can allow us to become better.
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Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. He also contributes to Legion of Leia and to Blumhouse. You can follow him on “The Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
