Film Review: Whit Stillman's “Barcelona” – JP

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Coral Gables, Florida – Last Sunday afternoon the Coral Gables Arts Cinema showed the film “Barcelona,” first released over 30 years ago in 1994. The writer, producer and director, Whit Stillman, was there to address the audience and answer a few questions after the showing. He is a Euro-American maker of independent films. See: www.gablescinema.com. Your correspondent and his wife had seen Mr. Stillman’s first film, “Manhattan,” in 1990 while living there. After that we moved to suburbia in order to raise our children, but returned to the city in order to see his second film, “Barcelona,” when it was released originally.

This film was a take off from the commercially successful film “An Officer and a Gentleman” featuring Richard Gere in 1982. The film “Barcelona” features two American cousins, an officer and a gentleman. The gentleman is based in Barcelona working for a corporation based in Chicago. He is very earnest and serious, and his voluminous reading ranges from Dale Carnegie to Peter Drucker, both business gurus. The officer is a Lieutenant, Junior Grade, from ROTC who is serving as an advance scout for the United States Navy’s Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean Sea. They are about to make a port visit to Barcelona.

The film tells us that the gentleman had perfect SAT scores and attended a very selective college, while the officer blew his SAT’s and therefore attended a less selective college. The officer is a lovable ruffian and conniver who doesn’t always return what he borrows. He shows up on very short notice at the gentleman’s apartment in Barcelona, and announces that he needs to stay in the guest room while he makes preparations for the fleet visit. Thereafter they engage in various misadventures with the local female talent. These females have cartoonish views of America, but accept the American security umbrella without question.

The City

Barcelona at that time was rejoining the mainstream of European civilization. During the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39, the surrounding region of Catalonia had strongly supported the socialist republic against the fascist rebellion. George Orwell traveled to Barcelona in order to serve as an ordinary soldier with an anarcho-syndicalist (anarchist-trade union) militia on the Aragon front. He kept notebooks of his experiences, and when he finished a notebook, he would mail it back to himself in London. Eventually he published this work of reportage as “Homage to Catalonia” in 1938. Orwell’s militia was leftist, but anti-Stalinist, and he would run afoul of the totalitarian left as the war went on.

Spain had avoided the religious wars of the XVth and XVIth centuries in Germany, France and England. They did so because the Spanish Inquisition, based in Castille: burned the first translation of the Bible into a modern European language, Catalan, in 1488; expelled the Jews in 1492; and showed an aptitude for burning heretics at all times. Potential Protestants got the message and did not dare test the tolerance of the Spanish state. So Spain deferred its religious war until the XXth century, when the two sides were international socialists (Communists and Soviets) versus national socialists (Fascists and Nazis)

During a rest-and-recreation leave in Barcelona from fighting at the front, Orwell went out for an afternoon stroll. One of his buddies, who was staying in the same boarding house, caught up to him to warn that the Soviet secret police, in those times operating under the acronym of NKVD and the direction of Lavrenti Beria, had been at their boarding house looking for him. Orwell took the hint and headed straight for the train station to France and out of town. Somewhere in the secret police’s headquarters on Lubyanka Square in Moscow, next to the statue of their founder Felix Dzerzhinsky, lies one of Orwell’s notebooks.

The Spanish Republic was denied aid by the Western democracies during the Spanish Civil War, so they turned to their ideological comrades, the Soviet Union. The Soviets soon took over the conduct of the war, and it became a precursor to the Eastern Front, 1941-45, when Soviet Russia was invaded by Nazi Germany. The Condor Legion of Nazi aviators conducted the first aerial bombing of a civilian population at Guernica in the Basque Country. Imagine everyone’s surprise at the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty of friendship and non-aggression between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany in 1939. Only a month later they both invaded Poland and the Second World War started.

Generalissimo Francisco Franco died in 1975, and with him died the military dictatorship that he had imposed after winning the Spanish Civil War in 1939. During the Franco dictatorship, the languages and cultures of both regions that had put up the stiffest resistance to the fascist rebellion, Catalonia and the Basque Country, were suppressed.

After Franco’s death, Spain transitioned to a constitutional monarchy on a similar model as the United Kingdom. In 1981 the military attempted to stage a coup d’etat by sending a mid-ranking officer and some para-military troops to shoot up the parliament building. The Bourbon King, to his credit and apparently having learned something from his predecessors, put on his Air Force uniform, went on television, and announced that any coup would have to succeed over his dead body. The coup fizzled and Spain joined NATO in 1982. Its membership before had been denied because it did not have a democratic political system, even though it had been a reliable associate for some time.

In 1986 Spain joined the European Community, and in 1992 Barcelona hosted the Summer Olympics and Futbol Club Barcelona won its first UEFA Champions Cup. This was the ambience in Barcelona when this film was set.

NATO

Notwithstanding the success of NATO in preserving democracy for Western Europe and winning the Cold War against the Soviet Union, for some reason Catalan socialists opposed NATO, probably taking the side of their ally during the Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union.

During the film, a local journalist publishes in a newspaper that the officer is in Barcelona, and accuses him of conspiring with the CIA to suppress liberation movements in the third world. The officer’s photo is published on the front page of a local newspaper, and other locals start showing their contempt for him. Then while the officer is riding in a taxi wearing his Navy uniform, an assassin riding on the back seat of a motorcycle shoots him in the head. He was not killed, but his recovery was very trying, and the gentleman shows true devotion to helping his cousin.

Catalans are very proud of their language and culture. This culture includes their culinary achievements. Barcelona features some of the world’s finest ham sandwiches, tapas, wines and beer, as well as Michelin-starred restaurants serving all sorts of delicious foods. Accordingly, it is surprising that they would show animosity toward NATO. But for NATO, they would be learning Russian, eating Borscht soup and drinking vodka.

The hostility of Catalan socialists toward NATO probably stems from NATO’s victory over their ideological comrade, the Soviet Union. This victory was led in its final stretch by three paragons of Christian, bourgeois, capitalism: President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher and Pope John Paul II.

In the film the officer recovered from the shooting and finished his performance wearing a very distinguished eye-patch. The gentleman was promoted to headquarters in Chicago, and returned there with a charming Catalan bride, who was condemned to endure the American culture of gun violence, consumerism and bourgeois domesticity.