“Barcelona” comes replete with explosions and assassination attempts, but its pleasures, like those of “Metropolitan,” have little to do with plot and everything to do with its highly chatty and trickily ironic tone. Though the director remains at wry arm’s length from Ted and Fred, it’s clear that he subscribes both to their America-centric world view and their beauty-fixated view of women. Just why all these gorgeous senoritas fall for these two puritanical gringos remains an unsolved mystery. Stillman, whose wife is from Barcelona, isn’t much interested in what lies behind the eyeball-pleasing surface of his fe-male characters; he’s an ogler, albeit a courtly one.
Nonetheless, Stillman remains a deftly funny portrait painter of the young, willfully self-involved Anglo-Saxon male. The primly hangdog Nichols and the spectacularly annoying Eigeman, both veterans of “Metropolitan,” are perfect vessels for the filmmaker’s arch comic sensibility. You may not be able to bring yourself to love them – Fred may be the only man in the U.S.A. who identified with Katharine Ross’s jilted blond groom at the end of “The Graduate” – but you will surely be amused. The prickly, conservative, jacket-and-tie iconoclasm of “Barcelona” is like nothing else around.
