The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Spanish Apartment – The Bad

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.