Feel like I missed something here

“Barcelona” mostly gave me the feeling that I was missing something. I didn’t really understand the characters, I couldn’t follow the paragraph-like dialogue and political speechifying of the time period (the dawn of the Cold War), and I didn’t understand the main purpose of the plot, if there was one at all. This movie felt like it was from another time with people I couldn’t exactly pinpoint.

Take cousins Ted (Taylor Nichols) and Fred (Chris Eigeman). Ted is a salesman in Spain who has resigned himself to the fact that he can only fall in love with a homely woman, as physical beauty blocks a man from seeing a woman’s true character. Fred is a lieutenant in the Navy who arrives unexpectedly on his cousin’s doorstep, saying he’s been assigned to Spain to scout the area. The relationship between the two men seems frosty at first, often playing out in sophisticated, rapid fire dialogue that mostly seems as pretentious as it does impenetrable.

Fred likes to take jabs at his cousin’s buttoned up demeanor by, for example, telling women that he wears leather underwear. Fred is also fiercely patriotic and can’t for a moment comprehend all the anti-American sentiment he’s seeing around the area. Americanism is seen as violent and racist, and that’s to say nothing of America’s place militarily around the world, which often comes off as fascist. This occasionally produces a funny line, like Ted defending America’s gun violence (“sure, we’re just better shots”).

But mostly these two men are weak characters- they are shallow and boring. At times the film comes off like a romance (there are two spanish girls the two men hang out with played by Mira Sorvino and Tushka Bergen, the later a total Heather Graham lookalike) and at times it comes off as a far more serious account of American ex-pats and the dangers they face but at best, on both counts, the film serves to only further highlight the arrogance of both characters while generally keeping anything likable or interesting about them close to the vest.

This movie presents the city of Barcelona as one glowing with personality and nightlife yet its two leads don’t have much personality at all, which confuses because on some level, the movie and its auteur (Whit Stillman) seem to like them. In the end I didn’t care for the film but feel like that might have been my fault more than the movie’s. I feel like I need to see it again.