Jan
27
Barcelona Director: Whit Stil…
January 27, 2010 | |
Barcelona
Director:
Whit Stillman
Writer/director Stillman again casts an affectionate eyesight on the foibles of preppy young Americans, this control two cousins all at bounding main in the sexual, high-minded and governmental whirl of a changing Old World. It's the 'model decade of the Cold War'. Ted (Nichols) is a callow, alarming-minded car-cast master getting all through a failed affair, his pick-up hardly helped when Fred (Eigeman) - a brash naval officer - turns up uninvited to lodge in his Barcelona flat. When Fred starts 'borrowing' money from his drove and meddling in his encounters with a number of girls, tensions between the pair go to a boil. An incisive comedy of misplaced American manners, this is for the most part a very entertaining portrait of immaturity deceived by its own ignorance and blinkered obstinacy. Agreed, it's harder to like or care about Ted and Fred as much as their younger (and consequence more forgivably deluded) counterparts in Stillman's earlier
Metropolitan
, and the story's sudden shift into elasticity-and-death melodrama in the final ask is a little clumsy. But the film looks good, the performances are sharp and droll, and there's more than enough nonconformity here to confirm Stillman as a idiosyncratic, beguiling talent.