Stillman’s Wit

by Jeff Schwager | Published August 9, 1994

Early on in Barcelona, the new film from writer-producer-director Whit Stillman, Ted Boynton reveals to his cousin Fred that he has given up on beautiful women—physical beauty, he says, has distracted him from real inner beauty for too long, and he has decided to go out with only "plain, or even rather homely, women" from now on. It's the sort of silly moral stance that is sure to delight fans of Stillman's first film, Metropolitan, which focused on a young, self-proclaimed socialist who ends up spending his winter vacation with a group of New York preppies who represent everything he should despise. What Tom Townsend, Metropolitan's protagonist, discovers over the course of the film is imperatives make for fine party conversation but that in the face of human considerations we must all remain flexible.

It's a lesson that the heroes of Barcelona are also destined to learn. Ted Boynton, a salesman who's in Spain as the representative of a Chicago-based company, has his life suddenly disrupted by the unexpected arrival of his cousin Fred, for whom he has a long-standing distaste as the result of an unpleasant boyhood incident.

Fred, a U.S. Navy officer, is surprised to find Barcelona a hot-bed of anti-American sentiment; as an act of defiance, he wears his dress uniform wherever he goes. Interestingly, that leads to the action which propels Fred and Ted into the current of Barcelona, which essentially mirrors the action that propels Tom Townsend into the world of Metropolitan. Tom, dressed in a rented tuxedo, ends up sharing a cab with a group of preppies who quickly befriend him as one of their own; Ted and Fred end up going to a costume party with a group of young Barcelonans who mistake Fred's uniform for a costume. Inevitably, these chance encounters end up changing the lives of Stillman's protagonists.

While Metropolitan is set in a world few of us have experienced first-hand, Stillman made the characters who inhabit that world instantly knowable. And while many of us might be predisposed toward dislike or at least envy where those characters are concerned, Stillman made us empathize with them: their problems were not unlike our own, running the gamut from the romantic / emotional to the ethical/philosophical. Even Nick Smith, the most outwardly snobbish of Metropolitan's young elite characters, is quietly redeemed through the course of the film's events.

Although the world in which Barcelona is set -is quite different from the world of Metropolitan, the film's two central characters, cousins Ted and Fred Boynton, played by Taylor Nichols and Chris Eigeman, bear striking similarities to the characters played by the same actors in Metropolitan, Charlie Black and Nick Smith. While they're a few years older, Ted/Charlie is still a hopeless romantic plagued by philosophical dilemmas, and Fred/Nick is the cynical realist.

But though Stillman himself leas said they are essentially the same characters with different names, there are some important differences, most notably Fred's choice of a career in the Navy. Nick, preppie-snob that he was, never would have gone for that.

What's most consistent through the two films is Stillman's distinctive cinematic and literary style, which is, in some ways, that of a WASP Woody Allen. Like Allen's characters, the characters who people Stillman's films are caught in philosophical and moral dilemmas, and they love to talk about them.

Ted's dictum regarding beautiful women changes when he meets Montserrat, a stunning Spanish woman with whom he falls madly in love. His reversal recalls the reversal Tom Townsend made in Metropolitan: Tom, initially repelled by the "urban haute bourgeois" life of his newfound friends, ultimately comes to accept, if not embrace, their way of life. That compromise - a tempering of strong beliefs - seems, in Stillman's world, to be the road to maturity.

Structurally, the chief difference between the films has to do with a life-shattering event that happens a little after Barcelona's midpoint. While it would be unfair to reveal what happens, suffice it to say that it has the feel of life's melodrama that was all but absent from Metropolitan.

The surprise is that while this event temporarily disrupts the lives of Barcelona's characters, it doesn't ultimately change them. This is another departure from movie convention, and one essential to Stillman's vision, in which changes are made in small increments rather than in leaps and bounds.

Visually, the films are also similar, despite a much greater budget on Barcelona. While Barcelona has a richer, deeper color scheme than the earlier film, the look is still muted, and camera movement is kept to a minimum. Stillman's camera remains focused on his characters' faces, and his vision continues to revolve around their words, which reveal an ever-deepening understanding of the world. 

If you were to take Hollywood's powers-that-be seriously, you might think that it's impossible to make a decent film for less than $10-20 mullion. Stillman puts the lie to that theory. Metropolitan cost under $100,000, while Barcelona cost in the low seven figures.

How does he achieve so much with so little money? No stars, no fancy effects, and terrific writing (Metropolitan earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay). Stillman's films disprove the old notion that talking heads are boring on screen; if the talk is interesting, so too is the movie.

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