The Spanish Apartment is an interesting movie
to write about because, as much as I connect with it, admire the stylish
direction, and adore the characters, its problematic areas are glaring. It kind of floors me that a film can succeed
so much at some things and stumble just as greatly at others. Today, we have the second of three posts
about this oddly contentious movie.
I
mentioned yesterday how much I love the cultural clutter of this film. I like the way the disparate roommates are so
surprisingly functional amidst their chaos, the way the different languages and
values sit alongside each other. The
movie does so well with this comfortable, if noisy, melding – it feels
absolutely genuine, so understated and natural.
So,
it’s startling when the theme of more specific cultural clash in the film is so
overdrawn and heavy-handed. This element
largely comes through the introduction of Wendy’s brother William – not a
student, William has been traveling Europe and comes to stay with the group
while he’s in Spain. He’s boorish and
tactless, and his first night in the apartment introduces the whole gang to his
preferred source of loudmouth humor:
national stereotypes. Yes, he’s
immature and self-assured, a dangerous combination, but he demonstrates first
an utter inability to read the obvious discomfort of the room and later an
insistent refusal to accept overt chastisement.
It’s
unpleasant to watch him monologue about how “Spanish people do this” and
“German people do this” and so on, and Wendy goes down in my estimation when
she doesn’t put a stop to it (the one instance where she really takes William
to task, after a particularly hurtful incident with Tobias, she doesn’t hold
her resolve for very long.) The whole
thing is coarse and too obvious, and since I’ve already established how wholly
I’m in the roommates’ corner, it only serves to make William my enemy. It doesn’t matter when he comes through for
his sister later, because the damage has long since been done.
This
business is especially clunky because of how overdone it is. In all of William’s stupid “jokes,” he never
says anything that even approaches funny-yet-distasteful. Not that being funny gives prejudice a pass,
but offense is frequently a part of humor and would at least allow his continued
insistence on it to make a bit of sense.
However, these sequences are utterly humorless. Literally, they involve nothing more than him
spouting cultural generalizations, badly mimicking languages he doesn’t speak,
and then laughing hysterically about it.
There’s no point to it, and if I were in the group’s place, the painful
lack of humor would make it uncomfortable even without the ignorant bigotry.
None of
this is helped by the fact that most of the characters are drawn pretty thinly
along national lines. Don’t get me wrong
– I still adore them and the little details in the writing, and the actors
breathe so much life into them that
they feel a lot more fully realized than they are. However, it’s no accident that, for example,
Italian Alessandro could either be called laidback or lazy while German Tobias
could be labeled either precise or anal retentive. The occasions when William gets dressed down
for his clichés are great, but they don’t land as well when you notice the
boilerplate framework at the core of most of the characters. There’s a line between cultural norms and
cultural stereotypes, and the film sometimes ventures too close to the wrong
side of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment