So I rented the Woody Allen movie before I went on my trip, so that I would have some idea of the landscape. But then I stopped it half-way through because I was irritated by the dialogue (after forty years of filmmaking, Allen still insists on characters who speak in the neurotic, superior, brain tumble, only now it comes out the of the mouths of gorgeous twenty-somethings... but that's for another post...)
Anyway, once I got home, I found myself curious as to how certain places that I visited might have been portrayed in the film. So I put it in my Netflix queue. It showed up in my mailbox the other day. It was pretty interesting to realize how many things shifted into context. There really is a sort of "tourist-y" element to the film that appeals to me. It doesn't pretend to be authentic to Catalonian daily life. Instead it is told through the perspective of two Americans traveling abroad. They even did "tourist-y" things like Park Guell, Sagrada Familia, and La Padrera. It occurred to me that this was kind of like setting a movie in New York and having the characters be enthralled with the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building.
But, again, I found this an interesting, authentic even, way of portraying the way we (including the filmmaker, I assume) discover new places and then burrow down into them once the basic landscape is covered.
Still. I did find myself fast-forwarding through a lot of the dialogue. Geez.
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The films of Almodovar capture some interesting aspects of Spanish society and use lots of street scenes as sets. Talk to Her and All About My Mother are a couple of the best.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Tom. I've been meaning to check him out. All About My Mother won a Best Pic oscar a couple of years ago.
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