Paris high-risk blog

Writer/director Stillman again casts an caring leer on the foibles of preppy young Americans, this time two cousins all at sea in the sexual, moral and governmental whirl of a changing Elderly World. It’s the ‘last decade of the Cold War’. Ted (Nichols) is a young, dangerous-minded car-following executive getting over a failed affair, his recovery hardly helped when Fred (Eigeman) - a brash naval narc - turns up uninvited to arrest in his Barcelona pampas. When Fred starts ‘borrowing’ money from his host and meddling in his encounters with various girls, tensions between the pair come to a boil. An incisive comedy of misplaced American manners, this is for the most separate a extraordinarily strange portrait of immaturity deceived by its own ignorance and blinkered obduracy. Agreed, it’s harder to like or take responsibility for about Ted and Fred as much as their younger (and hence more forgivably deluded) counterparts in Stillman’s earlier Metropolitan, and the story’s unwonted shift into life-and-death melodrama in the final reel is a little clumsy. But the film looks cloth, the performances are dapper and droll, and there’s more than adequate originality here to confirm Stillman as a distinctive, beguiling endowment.