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

It’s a shame that The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is set up to descend in quality, because each review gets further from the film’s good qualities.  Still, we’re finishing up today with my last post on The Spanish Apartment, and it’s the grimmest of the lot:  the ugly.  (Note:  some spoilers for this film and its sequel, Russian Dolls.)  The good news is that it’s not overwhelming.  I didn’t pick up on it the first few viewings, and even then, you see similar issues in (far too) many films, but it’s disappointing to see in a film that has so much to love.  Isn’t that always the way?  In this case, the issue is how it handles female characters.  Virtually every major woman in the film is written mostly in service of Xavier.  Now, it’s his story, and he’s obviously the focal point and the most fleshed-out character, but the women, more so than the men, are characterized in problematic gender ways.  This is especially true with Martine, Anne-Sophie, and Isabelle.

To start, I’ll point out that all three have shading outside their relationships with Xavier.  Anne-Sophie is a repressed newlywed afraid to venture out into her new country.  Isabelle has a girlfriend, pride in her Walloon identity, and strong opinions.  Even Martine, the thinnest of the three, has her own thoughts and emotions.  However, all three serve a much larger, less nuanced purpose in Xavier’s story.  Anne-Sophie is taken with Xavier almost from the get-go.  She appears lingerie-clad in Xavier’s subconscious and otherwise, her weak rebuff of his advances crumbles at his romantic prowess, and when they begin an affair, her recent marriage is so far from her thoughts that she keeps trying to paw at Xavier even when her husband is home.  Similarly, though Isabelle is gay and, as such, out of the running as a bedmate, the film continually goes to the “hot lesbian” well with her, always for Xavier’s benefit.  He’s the only one to hear her story of being hit on at a dance class, and she gives him a how-to in seducing women, first demonstrating on him and later enlisted her girlfriend for an exhibition.  Furthermore, her lingering glances and comments that it’s “a shame” he’s not a girl feed into het-male fantasies of “turning” a lesbian.  Finally, Martine is Xavier’s girlfriend, but she only plays a part in the film when it’s convenient.  When he needs a push into another woman’s arms, she’s judgmental of his new friends and nags him over the phone, and when he needs an emotional struggle, she obligingly pops up to break his heart with news that she’s been seeing someone.

I should note that Xavier never feels the least bit bad about cheating on Martine or cuckolding Anne-Sophie’s husband, but when he hears that Martine has stepped out on him, it’s all sad music, wallowing, and tearful stares at a photograph of them.  It’s all about his pain and her betrayal, no sense of regret or understanding.  Worse, the film never really acknowledges this as a problem.  No one points out that Xavier was in fact cheating on her and helping another woman cheat on someone else, and maybe he doesn’t have much license to throw a pity party.

It’s interesting, because almost all the female characters are more detailed than the non-Xavier males, but their storylines tend to hinge on their romantic entanglement with/ability to titillate him.  It’s a bit of a camouflage – because they’re rounder, you might not notice it at first, but once you do, it’s unmistakable.  Wendy, who mostly escapes this gendered focus, is admittedly pretty well fleshed-out; however, while she’s not really on Xavier’s romantic or sexual radar in this movie, she becomes a major contender in Russian Dolls.  It’s also noteworthy, I think, that Soledad, the one woman with a solid boyfriend she remains faithful to, is definitely the one with the least shading.  Is it because we know nothing will happen between her and Xavier? 

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.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Spanish Apartment (2002, R) – The Good

This is the first time I’ve done a Good/Bad/Ugly write-up for something that’s not a Buster Keaton MGM film, so make of that distinction what you will.  However, I rewatched this film lately and was reminded of how massively flawed it is, and yet how there’s something about it I just love.

Xavier is a Parisian grad student who, wanting to make himself more employable, decides to spend a year in Barcelona going to school and becoming fluent in Spanish – global economy and all.  Along the way, he shares an apartment with an eclectic gaggle of international students, and somewhere in the multicultural hodgepodge, he starts to find himself.  Coming-of-age story on overdrive, it’s more of a journey than a story, but while it doesn’t always know where it’s headed, the vivid characters keep that journey engaging.

Because I have a lot more to say about the successes and sins of this movie than the likes of Speak Easily or Parlor, Bedroom and Bath, I’m dividing up my review over several days, and we’re starting with the best feet forward.  The direction is crisp and eye-catching, which goes a long way toward helping it stand out from other films of its kind.  I really like the creative audio/visual techniques thrown in; they give the film a lot of personality.

Xavier’s position as the film’s narrator is strong.  Sure, he has plenty of mid-20s identity angst, and he has his share of poor qualities (more on that another day,) but he’s supposed to be sort of searching and rudderless.  I like the way he gradually becomes part of Barcelona, the way the city adopts him and he stops being just a Parisian.  When his girlfriend comes to visit, it’s clear that they’ve already drifted – he’s changing so much so fast, and she’s stayed behind.

Without a doubt, though, I love this movie for its ensemble.  When Xavier is first interviewed as a prospective roommate, he’s enchanted by the other students, thinking, “It was like I’d always lived in this mess.”  He loves the noise of it all, the love and the squabbling, the multilingual mishmash and cultural potpourri that permeates the apartment.  Though most of his friends are drawn lightly without much shading, the whole experience feels so specific and lived-in.  Like Xavier, I can’t get enough of their camaraderie, and I love the confused way their conversation flits between languages.  I also like the many little touches to film paints of their dynamic, like the way their fridge organization system descends into entropy, or the cheat-sheet by the phone which says “So-and-so isn’t here” in each roommate’s native language.  Scatterbrained Alessandro, industrious Wendy, fastidious Tobias, lively Soledad, serious Lars, and outspoken Isabelle are absolutely the reason to see the film. 

While it’s firmly Xavier’s story, my favorite moments aren’t focused on him at all.  I love Tobias and Wendy discussing a personal matter in Spanish so her visiting brother won’t understand them.  I love Alessandro dancing down the street to class, the only person in the world for all he cares.  I love Wendy grumbling to herself when a fuse blows and it falls to her to sort things out.  I love Soledad riding on the handlebars of Lars’s bike, I love Isabelle squeezing herself onto an already-crowded couch, and I love the shot of them all peering out of Wendy’s bedroom Scooby Doo-style when Xavier is talking to the landlord.  For two hours, these characters are my Italian-English-German-Spanish-Danish-Belgian friends, and that’s fantastic.