Barcelona and Metropolitan: On Not Telling All

I only just realized that I've never blogged about Barcelona or Metropolitan! And you know, if you haven't blogged about it, you haven't really experienced it. (Thankfully, I have blogged about one of the trilogy, The Last Days of Disco. That's something.) So...

Barcelona:

The first time I watched this, I was intrigued because it deals with the Americans in Europe theme, which I am a little fascinated by. I mean, when Stearns and I were in Europe the first time, and we would run into American highschoolers who were there to drink and maybe see something old for an hour in the afternoon, before beginning to drink again...well, I didn't think all that highly of at least some Americans in Europe. And then my sister and I had drinks with our second cousin and his friends in Madrid and they were asking us if we watched Beverly Hills ninety thousand, two hundred and ten. And then I saw what they thought of Americans.

All that to say, I find the Christ Eigeman character perpetually annoying and irredeemable in all of the Whit Stillman films (although I think that I'm too harsh on him--I think that he's meant to have some redeeming characteristics). And in Barcelona, his naivete of how to act in another country and his manipulation of his cousin are reprehensible.

And I'm not sure what to think about the ending--the American boys get Spanish wives and come home and cook them hamburgers. In a way, this is good--it shows that openness between the two cultures is possible and that misunderstandings can be transcended. It shows that the European disdain for American hamburgers has to do with the fact that the hamburgers in Europe aren't so good. Well, and it shows that understanding everything isn't always best (sometimes the secrets that the Chris Eigeman character makes up really do spice things up in a good way).

Metropolitan:

This is the first Whit Stillman film that I watched. I remember being intrigued by the dialogue, which was a little pretentious, but witty. And by the darkness of the film (it was clear that it was a low-budget film). And by the slow pace (this is again one of those films in which two characters take painfully long to see that they should care for each other).

I guess something about Stillman films is that there are more and less problematic characters, but there are not typically really great ones. Alice stands out in The Last Days of Disco, but she is in no way without flaws, nor is she really great in spite of her flaws. In the same way, Tom in Metropolitan is pretty endearing, but, for all of his philosophical reflection on the group and for all of his outside-ness, he still ends up in the group, possibly a better member of the group than the other members (although he doesn't see right away when it is time for the group to disintegrate). Audrey sticks out as a character a bit better than the others--she realizes that you have to actually read Jane Austen (and not just literary critics). She also realizes that secrets can be good--and that telling all is a problem, which is why we have manners in social situations (this theme meshes with Barcelona's theme of the possibility for conversation between cultures, but also of the beauty of difference, a difference that never should entirely go away.