Barcelona

The Movie Snob revisits an old favorite.

Barcelona (B+).  I have long enjoyed indie director Whit Stillman’s work, so it’s a shame I still haven’t reviewed all (five) of his movies on this blog.  I recently rewatched this one, the second of his “doomed bourgeois in love” trilogy from the 1990s, and I enjoyed it yet again. It’s the 1980s, and two young American men, Fred and Ted, find themselves in the titular city of Barcelona.  Like most of Stillman’s characters, they are hyperarticulate, constantly musing aloud about the things that matter most to young people—mostly love and commitment, but also concerns about career, success, and finding a place in the modern world. Fred and Ted also happen to be cousins who are more like bickering brothers, and they make a fun odd couple as Fred first unexpectedly drops in on Ted for an extended stay and then tries to liven up his social life.  The movie is unusually political for a Stillman film, with anti-Americanism and terrorism making up an important element of the story.  Watch for Mira Sorvino in a substantial role just a year before her Oscar-winning turn in Mighty Aphrodite.

I have the Criterion Collection DVD and watched several of the extras, including a few talk-show interviews with Stillman that were kind of interesting.  I also rewatched some of the movie with the commentary track turned on.  The commentary featured Stillman and the two stars of the film, Taylor Nichols (The American President) and Chris Eigeman (Metropolitan), and it wasn’t as insightful or as interesting as I had hoped it would be.  Anyway, if you enjoy witty dialogue, you should definitely check out Stillman’s work—his other films being Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco, Damsels in Distress, and Love and Friendship.

Metropolitan

DVD review from The Movie Snob.

Metropolitan  (A-).  Well, your reviewer was feeling a bit under the weather, so I wanted something light and cheery.  I had fond memories of this 1990 indie flick but hadn’t seen it in years, so I pulled down my unwatched Criterion Collection DVD and gave it a spin.  Suffice to say, it was as good as I remembered it being.  It is about eight young people—four girls and four guys, early college-age, as best I can tell—who gather almost every night in Manhattan over one Christmas break to go to various debutante parties or balls or whatever they are.  We don’t see too much of the parties themselves—the focus is on the after-parties, where the youngsters earnestly discuss all sorts of things you might not expect, like Jane Austen, the existence of God, and the relative merits of the bourgeoisie.  Hm, I’m not really selling the movie very well.  There are plenty of romantic complications too as sweet and inexperienced Audrey gets a crush on group newcomer and professed socialist Tom, who is still hung up on his ex-girlfriend Serena, who was last known to be dating the repellent Rick Von Sloneker.  And the dialogue really is very funny, at least if you think it’s funny to hear lines like “Ours is probably the worst generation since the Protestant Reformation” delivered by very young people with drop-dead seriousness.

Writer-director-producer Whit Stillman went on to make two other excellent films in the 1990s, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco, (starring Chloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale).  Enough people took notice of his work to result in the 2002 publication of a book called Doomed Bourgeois in Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman.  Stillman then went quiet for a long time.  Then in 2011 he released Damsels in Distress, which I thought was good but not as good as his prior work, and then in 2016 he released the better Love & Friendship.  IMDB.com doesn’t show that he has anything new in the works, but I’m holding out hope.  If you are new to his work I recommend you start at the beginning and give Metropolitan a try!

Love & Friendship (book review)

A new book review from The Movie Snob.

Love & Friendship: In Which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon Is Entirely Vindicated, by Whit Stillman (2016).  Director Whit Stillman has written a novelization of his recent movie Love & Friendship, starring Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny.  (Although I never read it, he did the same for his movie The Last Days of Disco, also starring Beckinsale and Sevigny.)  I can’t say the novel really adds much to the film, but it is an adequate and enjoyable enough retelling of the schemes and machinations of the unscrupulous Lady Susan.  The novel’s narrator is Lady Susan’s nephew, who desperately attempts to make his aunt look like a victim of slander instead of the schemer she so clearly was.  As an added bonus, Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan is included in the appendix, so you can see the bones that Stillman built his movie and novel out of.  The package is enjoyable enough, but it’s nothing to get too excited about.

Love & Friendship – a concurring opinion

From the desk of The Movie Snob.

Love & Friendship  (B).  I cannot find anything to criticize in Mom Under Cover’s fine review, so I will simply register my agreement.  I expect Whit Stillman will get an Oscar™ nomination for his screenplay, adapted from the work of the divine Jane Austen, and I won’t be surprised if Kate Beckinsale (Whiteout) scores a nomination for her entertaining turn as the hilariously self-interested Lady Susan.  Still, I don’t think this movie is quite up to the same level as Stillman’s amazing trilogy of movies Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994) (co-starring Mira Sorvino), and The Last Days of Disco (1998) (starring Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny, just like Love & Friendship does).  If you like Love & Friendship, by all means look up Stillman’s earlier work.  (Damsels in Distress (2011) is not quite in the same league as his trilogy.)

Incidentally, Stillman had also published a novelization of Love & Friendship that sounds very interesting.  From what I have read, this novel is written as though it were the work of one of Lady Susan’s relatives, and he attempts throughout to defend her utterly indefensible behavior as described by Jane Austen.  (The full title of the book is Love & Friendship: In Which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon Is Fully Vindicated.)  It sounds pretty funny.  He also published a novelization of The Last Days of Disco, with the expanded title The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterward, which I have also never read.

Love & Friendship

Mom Under Cover makes it out to the cinema.

Love and Friendship (B)

Another movie that feels like a play is Amazon’s first feature film adapted from Jane Austen’s unfinished epistolary novella, Lady Susan.  Whit Stillman (Metropolitan  1990, Barcelona  1994) kept the dialog sounding true to period, witty with barbs.  Kate Beckinsale, as Lady Susan Vernon, delivers beautifully. The plot is much like a Shakespearean comedy.  Lady Susan is a widow without means whose attempts to score a new hubby (Xavier Samuel as Reginald De Courcy) are almost undone when the intended becomes interested in Lady Susan’s daughter, Fredica (Morfydd Clark), who is much closer to his age. Solid performances by Stephen Fry, Justin Edwards, and Chloë Sevigny.

Damsels in Distress

New review from The Movie Snob

Damsels in Distress (B-).  I cannot remember ever looking forward to a movie with as much anticipation as I did this one.  (OK, maybe The Empire Strikes Back.)  Back in the 90s, this fellow named Whit Stillman wrote and directed three movies that I love: Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco.  They are mostly about romance among young adults (collegians and folks in their 20s), but they are not realistic.  The characters are generally thoughtful and hyperarticulate (to the point that Woody Allen seems tongue-tied by comparison), but they still suffer from flaws and blind spots, and his movies are as concerned about manners and morality as a Jane Austen novel.  Anyway, I urge you to give Metropolitan a try if you haven’t seen it, and then try the rest of Stillman’s work if you like it.

This new release is my least favorite of Stillman’s films, but I still liked it.  It’s about four female roommates at a fictional university called Seven Oaks, and mainly about their ringleader Violet (Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha) and new transfer student Lily (Analeigh Tipton, Crazy, Stupid, Love).  Violet is extremely serious about everything she does — like making the world a better place, helping run the campus suicide prevention center, and trying to figure out the best kind of boys to date — and she constantly makes observations on these and other matters in polysyllabic Stillman fashion.  And I think Gerwig does a fine job of playing Violet straight, without ever winking at the audience or lapsing into parody.  Lily is more normal and brings a little bit of an outsider’s perspective to Violet’s clique.  Plotwise, the movie is more of a series of vignettes about the girls and their romantic misadventures than a conventional dramatic arc.

As I say, I enjoyed it pretty well.  You probably will too, if you have some taste for the absurd (like a fellow who says, in all earnestness, that he is of the Cathar religion, and another who never learned the names of the colors), and some tolerance for the fact that no real person talks (or probably thinks) like Stillman’s characters do.  But I was troubled by a couple of things.  First, characters say something vaguely derogatory about Catholicism on two occasions.  But I wasn’t too much bothered by it because the characters are so odd and because it seems likely that they’re not supposed to have any idea what they’re talking about.  Second, I was a little troubled by the film’s comic treatment of the campus suicide prevention center, and of mental illness more generally.  It comes to light that one of the characters suffered from OCD in childhood, and I’m not sure what to make of it. The film doesn’t make fun of it, but I’m not sure why it’s in there at all.  In conclusion, I’d say the film is just a little more absurd and less focused than Stillman’s earlier films, and not as satisfying.  But it’s definitely a different kind of moviegoing experience.  If it sounds interesting, look for it at your local arthouse theater, and maybe Stillman won’t wait 14 years before making his next film.