Word: barcelona
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Whit Stillman's new film, "Barcelona" was atrociously bad. It may have been too deep for this reviewer, but I found it unendurably boring. I would have watched pay-perview and seen the entirety of the summer Olympics from this city rather than watch this again...
...Barcelona" follows two cousins through their slow, boring, meaningless lives in Barcelona, Spain. The setting is post-Franco Spain where discos still reign and xenophobic feeling towards Americans is rampant. Taylor Nichols plays Ted Boynton, an American working for an international motor company who is content to stay at home and dance while reading his Bible. (By the way, this was the most interesting scene of the entire film). His placid life is interrupted when his cousin Fred (Chris Eigeman) arrives, purportedly the lead man for his naval ship which is supposed to arrive in Barcelona soon. Fred likes...
...Metropolitan" and their characters do not seem to have progressed much since then. Nichols still plays the over-earnest philosopher and Eigeman continues to play the smart-alecky underling. It's as if Stillman moved the two of them from their New York high rises to the streets of Barcelona and told them to make the best of the locals...
...only mildly amusing and intellectually stimulating part of the storyline is the close-minded reactions Fred and Ted (no it is not an "excellent" or even "bogus" adventure) have to the anti-American sentiment in Barcelona. During his first tour of the city, Fred comes upon a wall scrawled with anti-American, anti-NATO slogans. Equipped with his felt-tipped pen, Fred changes the Spanish word for pigs ("cerdos") to that for deers ("ciervos"). It ends up reading "Yankee Deers Go Home." The problem here is that you don't know if you are supposed to laugh or scoff...
...think Stillman should have stayed with a narrow scope like he did in "Metropolitan." In "Barcelona" he spreads over too many incongruous issues and never resolves them. In the end, you walk away not knowing, and really not caring what happened in the film...