Gaudà Afternoon is a charming little movie filled with the quirky humour that is director Susan Seidelman’s trademark. Like the film that made her famous, Desperately Seeking Susan, it has to do with searching for self and others, finding the journey a learning experience. The laughs come from what one might call the comedy of confusion.
Judy Davis plays Cassandra, a middle-aged American woman living in Barcelona. She is a translator, hard at work (when she is not being interrupted by the noisy kids next door) at getting into English the latest fashionable magic realist novel from Latin America. Out of the blue, there turns up on her doorstep a suspiciously over-the-top woman, Frankie (Marcia Gay Harden), who is trying to track down a missing husband and needs the help of someone who can speak Spanish.
Thus Cassandra is sucked into a maelstrom of tangled relationships and uncertain identities, involving the aforementioned Frankie, a lesbian mom (Lili Taylor), a kooky aromatherapist-cum-reflexologist (Juliette Lewis), a performing magician (Christopher Bowen) and a child who seems to have too many mothers. Cassandra tries to get out of this mess as soon as she has the money promised to her by Frankie, but something keeps pulling her back in.
The Barcelona setting gives the movie its title, though it takes place over more than an afternoon. Antoni Gaudà was the eccentric architect of a century ago who conceived some of the most extraordinary buildings ever — his Sagrada Familia cathedral looks from a distance like a weird child’s mud-castle with stalagmite spires constructed drip by drip. Close up, it looks like an organic growth, with its saints and gargoyles entwined in a convoluted surface where decoration has become structure. Other works of his include apartment blocks with curves where straight lines might reasonably be expected and the fabulous shapes and patterns of his Parc Güell.
A criticism to be made of Gaudà Afternoon, given its title, is that more could have been made of the architecture, though we do get to see the interior of one of the apartments and there is a nighttime scene on the roof of the building, but it is relatively brief. There is some movement through Parc Güell, but we don’t see much of it. Certainly the spaces offered by GaudÃ’s often skewed constructions would seem to present an opportunity for some interesting visuals — remember the rooftop scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, with Jack Nicholson and Maria Scheider stalking each other among the twisted chimneys?
But then I suppose Seidelman is more interested in character than in architecture, and in any case she isn’t making an art movie of the Antonioni kind. The film may be presented in South Africa as an art movie (and is playing the festival circuit overseas), but there is nothing terribly arty or demanding about it. This is no Amores Perros or Before Night Falls. Gaudà Afternoon is a comedy that revolves around mishap and misunderstanding, around the complications inherent in the human heart.
James Myhre’s script (from Barbara Wilson’s novel) is airy and the important themes, such as love and motherhood, that underpin it don’t get in the way of the light-footed plot. The Spanish setting, the presence of the odd transvestite and the madcap goings-on give it a faint whiff of Pedro Almodóvar’s movies — you might find it Almodóvar Lite, except that it has Seidelman’s distinctive touch. What holds it together, and gives it its interest, is the quartet of central characters played by four impressive actors, especially Judy Davis, who manages to be funny while acting serious. And we can all find a little comfort in the confusions of fictional lives.