In The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen, Peter J. Bailey writes of Manhattan, “The exquisite craft of the film, which conjures up a city of Gershwinian sublimity, is contravened by the interior lives of its characters; in a significant sense, Manhattan is about its own cinematic “faking” of Manhattan” (2003: 47–48). Manhattan, the central city of Woody Allen films, and Manhattan, the filmmaker’s central statement on that city, have been much discussed in the literature concerning the films and their maker. Often this commentary returns to concerns, such as Bailey’s, over the authenticity of the films’ presentation of the city and the meaning of their accuracy or inaccuracy. Crucially, though, the films are not necessarily judged by how faithful they are at representing Manhattan but by how telling their indiscretions or discrepancies are in regard to other elements within the films. Reception of the films begins with recognizing/misrecognizing the deployment of the city.

According to Bailey,

One distinguishing feature of his more substantial films is that they do what Manhattan does: they deliberately place under ironic scrutiny their own tropism toward idealizing New York. That self-critical attitude manifests itself in Manhattan through the juxtaposition of the city’s magnificently visualized surfaces with what Isaac characterizes as its human substance and heart: “the decay of contemporary culture.” To configure the central antinomy of the film differently, the cinematic art which makes Manhattan such a sumptuously gratifying visual experience finds nothing resembling an answering moral perfection in its characters, the film’s repeatedly invoked disparity between surface and subject, form and content, generating its major thematic dynamic (2003: 48).

When analyzing the topos of Woody Allen’s films, especially in regard to Manhattan, critics consider these dynamics between surface and subject, form and content, in order to read the theme of the films as a measurement of the juxtaposition between elements. In his analysis of the relation between characters and setting in Manhattan, for example, Bailey finds,

Although he experiences temporary success in imbuing himself with the city’s sexiest virtues, throughout the rest of the film the Manhattan in Isaac’s mind remains an ideal, unchanging metropolis completely irreconcilable with the emotional inconstancy, faithlessness, and ex tempore egocentrism of its actual inhabitants (2003: 52).

In this film, certainly, the city comes off better than the characters who inhabit it. In fact, the very relation between the city and the characters works to increase the standing of the former while decreasing the standing of the latter. The weaknesses of the characters mark the strength of the setting. In conclusion, then, Bailey notes,

The Manhattan of Manhattan turns out to be a fantasy projection so narcissistically magnificent and pure that it can live on only in art. Ironically, the capacity for which Allen is indicting art in Manhattan is its ability to transform reality into something more morally coherent, harmonious, and beautiful that it actually is. (“Beauty is untruth,” might be the film’s rewriting of Keats.) New York remains Isaac Davis’s town at the end of Manhattan, and it probably always will be his town. But it’s a much smaller, much bleaker, and much less romantic city than the one Tracy and George Gershwin – and Gordon Willis – illuminated for him. And for us (57).

Allen’s film, then, in the end, criticizes even this relationship by reminding us that the city itself is the idealized creation of one of its characters. Therefore, an analysis of the topos of Manhattan and of the juxtaposition of character and setting, leads to questions about the role of art in transforming a city into a location, especially one as fantastic as seen in Manhattan.

Ultimately, Bailey’s criticism of Manhattan turns toward the function of the location rather than the representation of it through his analysis of the film’s topos. It is not the commonplace (koinòs tópos) question of setting or of the relation between fictional and real cities in order to judge the artifice of one by the authenticity of the other. It is not a question of location alone or of the conventions (loci communes) of character development against the background of a locale. Rather, it is a question of what the location does in the film, how it functions in regard to the other elements of the film. If the film is seen as an enunciation rather than a representation then, a functional analysis considers the relationship between its constituent parts and its audience address. Thus, the relation between the characters and the setting highlights the deployment of both elements.

In a similar way, this chapter takes up Woody Allen’s 2007 Vicky Cristina Barcelona, not to judge the authenticity of its representation of “Barcelona” against the city and attendant history of Barcelona but to examine its function as topos in the film, especially in relation to four other major films that have deployed Barcelona. The question of the accuracy or inaccuracy of these deployments is not the concern of this analysis. Rather, the concern here is the ways in which Barcelona functions in regard to the other elements of the film and its audience address. Like Manhattan, Vicky Cristina Barcelona makes much of the juxtaposition between location and characters; however, the latter’s deployment of Barcelona positions its topos within a long tradition – the tradition of the city of refuge – rather than the city of sublimity.

Since Michelangelo Antonioni set a sequence of Professione: Reporter (The Passenger, 1975) in Barcelona, a number of films have made special use of locations in this “unique” Spanish-Catalonian city and its surroundings. This chapter compares Vicky Cristina Barcelona with Antonioni’s film, Whit Stillman’s Barcelona (1994), Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother (1999), and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful (2010) in order to trace the function of Barcelona in each. In these films, Barcelona marks a certain temporally and spatially ambivalent topos, one which challenges the morally coherent, harmonious, and beautiful locatedness of the city of sublimity with the duality of the city of refuge. Throughout these films, Barcelona functions as a city of refuge, as the topos of encounters – linguistic, cultural, economic, and personal – and of the duality of refuge, as escape and exile. Its very ambivalence marks the immediacy and vulnerability of this location. Characters in Barcelona are always passengers; they arrive and depart, but they never remain. Thus, like the city Don Quixote encounters, Barcelona remains always courteous, sheltering, and valiant, marking an ethos never quite one’s own, somehow always foreign, that makes its characters better for having seen the city regardless of the pleasure or grief of the adventures that befall them there. To describe Barcelona in these films as a city of refuge, then, is to connect the deployment of this city to Cervantes and older traditions.

Cities of Refuge

The cities which you give to the Levites shall be the six cities of refuge, where you shall permit the manslayer to flee, and in addition to them you shall give forty-two cities.

(Numbers 35:6)

Cities of refuge, places of asylum, locations of sanctuary have a long history. One trajectory traces their origins within the biblical tradition, another marks them as older than their biblical account. As a starting point, we might refer to Numbers 35:9–28.

And the Lord said to Moses, “Say to the people of Israel, When you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall select cities to be cities of refuge for you, that the manslayer who kills any person without intent may flee there. The cities shall be for you a refuge from the avenger, that the manslayer may not die until he stands before the congregation for judgment. And the cities which you give shall be your six cities of refuge. You shall give three cities beyond the Jordan, and three cities in the land of Canaan, to be cities of refuge. These six cities shall be for refuge for the people of Israel, and for the stranger and for the sojourner among them, that any one who kills any person without intent may flee there.”

According to the biblical account, God commands the Israelites to set aside six cities as cities of refuge, where those who commit manslaughter may take shelter from immediate revenge. Anyone who accidentally kills someone can escape to these six cities to take refuge. They are open cities, cities accessible to natives, foreigners, or travelers, regardless of whether these persons unintentionally killed natives, foreigners, or travelers. They are to be a place of respite until proper decisions and judgments can be made.

However, the biblical description continues, cities of refuge shall not be open to those who commit murder through open neglect or irresponsible behavior or intentionally – whether in a fit of rage or through a premeditated scheme. Murderers who commit murder through irresponsible or intentional actions shall be put to death. Furthermore, they shall be put to death by the avenger – a family member of the victim – as soon as they meet. If there is any doubt, the community should intercede and remove the unintentional murderer to the city of refuge until “the death of the high priest who was anointed with the holy oil.” Therefore, the emphasis is on the protection of the accidental killer and the patience of proper legal deliberation. The city of refuge is a “safe place” that allows for thought, for consideration, for decision, without haste. As long as the refugee remains in hiatus within the city of refuge, he cannot be killed by the avenger. If he should wander from the city, though, and encounter the avenger, the avenger can take his revenge without being “guilty of blood.” In this way, the city of refuge links time and place. The refugee is safe as long as he remains within the confines of the city of refuge or until the proper time period has expired. As the passage from Numbers concludes, “For the man must remain in his city of refuge until the death of the high priest; but after the death of the high priest the manslayer may return to the land of his possession.” The refugee must remain within the city of refuge until the full sentence is served. And this last point is the key to understanding cities of refuge. As much as they allow the refugee to escape, they also imprison them. Cities of refuge are not utopia that simply allow the guilty (even if accidentally) to go free of time and place. As much as they provide refuge, they also enact exile. Cities of refuge only protect those who remain confined within their walls; thus, cities of refuge are also punishments. In cities of refuge, then, there is protection of the innocent which is also punishment of the guilty: both at the same time in the same place.

In Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures (1994), Emmanuel Levinas extends the way in which we consider this passage from Numbers to include more than literal murders and manslaughter. Levinas relates the concept of cities of refuge to social, economic, and political imbalance and magnifies the relation between escape and exile inherent in cities of refuge. Thus, Levinas’ reading of cities of refuge fits more appropriately into our discussion of the function of Barcelona as a city of refuge in contemporary films, especially in regard to the focus on refugee and tourist escape/exile in these films, including Vicky Cristina Barcelona. In his reading of this passage and Talmudic responses to it, Levinas asks if all modern cities might not be considered cities of refuge, with the attendant dangers. Have not the very social, economic, and political structures of the modern city made them all into refugee camps?

The cities in which we live and the protection that, legitimately, because of our subjective innocence, we find in our liberal society (even if we find it is a little less than before) against so many threats of vengeance fearing neither God nor man, against so many heated forces; is not such protection, in fact, the protection of a half-innocence or half-guilt, which is innocence but nevertheless also guilt – does not all this make our cities cities of refuge or cities of exiles? And while it is a necessary defence against the barbarity of heated blood, dangerous states of mind, and threatening disorder, is not civilization – our brilliant and humanist Graeco-Roman civilization, our wise civilization – a tiny bit hypocritical, too insensitive to the irrational anger of the avenger of blood, and incapable of restoring the balance? (1994: 40).

Cities of refuge are certainly necessary, claims Levinas, as protections against injustice, outrage, and irrationality. Cities of refuge maintain order, allowing for procedural justice to rule. Yet, as necessary as this economic, social, judicial ordering is, he challenges, it remains unable to address two concerns. First, by its ordered structure, it cannot address that which exceeds order, procedure, and rule. Order can only address order. Second, because its ordering relies upon a hiatus – it puts judgment on hold – it fails to address the restoration of the balance of social justice between the refugee and the injured party. Abiding in the city of refuge is remaining and waiting, patiently. Its patience demands a remaining in suspension. While cities of refuge may alter certain aspects of retributive justice, then, they are neither restorative nor reparative.

It is this relation among the tensions at the core of cities of refuge – refuge/exile and retribution/restoration – that Jacques Derrida elaborates in his discussion of the ethics of hospitality in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001). And, it is this elaboration on hospitality that connects the deployment of Barcelona as a city of refuge in these films. In the essay, Derrida asserts,

We have doubtless chosen the term “city of refuge” because, for quite specific historical reasons, it commands our respect, and also out of respect for those who cultivate an “ethic of hospitality.” “To cultivate an ethic of hospitality” – is such an expression not tautologous? Despite all the tensions or contradictions which distinguish it, and despite all the perversions that can befall it, one cannot speak of cultivating an ethic of hospitality. Hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethic amongst others. Insofar as it has to do with the ethos, that is, the residence, one’s home, the familiar place of dwelling, inasmuch as it is a manner of being there, the manner in which we relate to ourselves and to others, to others as our own or as foreigners, ethics is hospitality; ethics is so thoroughly coextensive with the experience of hospitality. But for this very reason, and because for this very reason, and because being at home with oneself (l’être-soi chez soi – l’ipséité meme – the one within oneself) supposes a reception or inclusion of the other which one seeks to appropriate, control, and master according to different modalities of violence, there is a history of hospitality, an always possible perversion of the law of hospitality (which can appear unconditional), and of the laws which come to limit and condition it in its inscription as a law (2001: 16–17).

Hospitality is culture. Ethics is hospitality. Derrida’s claim here is that ethics as ethos connects culture and custom back to the home, to the act of hosting and to the complex relation between host and hostage. Cities of refuge host refugees but also make hostages of refugees and at the same time cities of refuge also make hostages of the hosts themselves. There are rights and regulations on both parties. Refugees must adhere to rules and regulations while in refuge. Cities of refuge must uphold certain standards while at the same time demanding certain standards from refugees. To cultivate an ethics of hospitality, then, is to relate between host and hostage.

This question of the ethics of hospitality (the relation between host and hostage) at play in cities of refuge (the site (topos) of escape and exile) is central to Don Quixote’s understanding of Barcelona – where he is treated as a guest/held hostage – while he visits there. Barcelona is no utopia (ou-topos) for Don Quixote. On the contrary, he suffers his greatest defeat and humiliation there. Yet, he proclaims, he is better for having experienced his downfall in Barcelona, for having experienced it and Barcelona. Despite being produced four hundred years later, the bulk of the films featuring Barcelona return to this trope of the city of refuge. From Antonioni’s Professione: Reporter (1975) to the recent 11-11-11 (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2011), Barcelona functions as a city of refuge, a location linking time and place, escape and exile, host and hostage. This function is especially prevalent in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, where Vicky and Cristina abide for a time treated as guests/held hostage.

Set in Barcelona

Quid quid est in territorio est de territorio.

(Medieval statement on territorial and personal independence and sovereignty)

Professione: Reporter is a film in which the narrative is composed almost entirely of meetings where the mise-en-scène provokes us to ask constantly where and when we are and were. In this film, it is a question of memory and location – of remembering and forgetting, of leading and following, of appearing and disappearing, as one might while lost in a maze where one is hidden and hiding. About halfway through the film, on a match on action edit, we are thrust into Barcelona, where the maze is made concrete.

“Hey, por favor!” shouts the Locke character as he dashes for a gondola. He catches the cable car and rides it over the docks, toward the sea, with the city in the background. The other passenger – a local man – remarks that it is beautiful, and Locke agrees, spreading his arms wide and nodding. He leans out over the sea and flaps his arms as if flying over the surface of the water. The topography of Barcelona is established – sea, docks, buildings climbing an incline toward the mountains – and Locke set within it, or at least over it.

At noon, he sits in the Umbraculo covered garden in the Parque Comunal. A man with a cane approaches, and Locke introduces himself by stating he is, “waiting for someone who hasn’t arrived.” The man begins to tell Locke his story, but as they talk, the camera cuts away to documentary footage of an execution and then a scene of Locke’s wife with another man. When we return to Barcelona, we see Locke exiting the Hotel Oriente, followed by the television producer he once worked with and now wants to avoid because Locke knows the producer can identify him as Locke. (The focus on ambivalence in this film permeates how we identify Locke – as Locke, his alter ego Robertson, some permutation of these identities, or as the “no one” he becomes at the end of the film.)

Locke disappears into a building open to tourists to avoid the producer and meets The Woman, an architecture student who will join him on the rest of the journey. It is through their first conversation that we learn where we are in Barcelona. In the sparsest terms, the scene also remembers the first half of the narrative.

Addressing The Woman, Locke says, “Excuse me, I was trying to remember something.”

“Is it important?”

“No.”

Glancing at the wall, referring to the building and the larger question of trying to remember something, Locke asks, “What is it, do you know? I came in by accident.” The woman does not tell him what the building is, but instead tells him about the architect’s death:

“The man who built it was hit by a bus.”

“Who was he?”

“Gaudí. Come. He built this house for a corduroy manufacturer. They used this room for concerts . . . Wagner.”

“Do you think he was crazy?”

Redirecting the conversation, The Woman asks, “How could you come in here by accident.”

“I was escaping.”

“From what?”

“I thought somebody might be following me. Somebody who might recognize me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I can’t recognize you. Who are you?”

“I used to be somebody else but I traded him in. What about you?”

“Well, I’m in Barcelona. I’m talking to somebody who might be someone else. I was with those people, but I think I’m going to see the other Gaudí buildings alone.”

“All of them?”

“They’re all good for hiding. Depends on how much time you’ve got.”

“I have to leave today. This afternoon.”

“I hope you make it. People disappear every day.”

“Every time they leave the room.”

“Goodbye.”

From the moment the film shifts to Barcelona, Professione: Reporter highlights the city’s function as a maze – as a location where the paths may lead nowhere and the line between hiding and getting lost blurs. In this way, in this film, the city and characters intersect. The topos of Barcelona in Professione: Reporter mirrors the characters, especially Locke and The Woman. The conversation in the corduroy estate house is indirect, curved. It matches Gaudí’s architecture. Here the soundtrack and visuals echo each other, not in content but in form.

When Locke and The Woman meet again on the rooftop of Gaudí’s Casa Mila apartments, at first, they have a difficult time navigating the space. They have to plan a route in order to meet between the spires. This navigating and planning a route then becomes a conversation in which they plan secretly to reclaim Locke’s belongings from his hotel and escape pursuit. Here, again, the characters and the city are not juxtaposed but used to amplify the topos of Barcelona in relation to its refugees. Barcelona is no safe haven for Locke but a maze he must learn to navigate as it hides him but also confounds him. He takes sanctuary in the dark corners and alcoves of the city, abides in the churches and parks, but is then trapped in the very shadows they provide. He is not free – as it seems in the opening scene set in the gondola – but suspended above the city or within its walls. Barcelona is a city of suspension. In taking refuge in Barcelona, he risks being trapped in Barcelona, as a guest, he is also held hostage.

While Allen’s Barcelona is visually more colorful and acoustically more buoyant than Antonioni’s, Vicky’s and Cristina’s experience of the city significantly does not differ from Locke’s and The Woman’s. There is, of course, a difference in tone and genre between the films. Professione: Reporter is a modernist drama while Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a postmodern romantic comedy. Yet, what their deployment of Barcelona marks is how close these films remain regarding questions of character identity and a certain relation to this location. In both films, Barcelona functions as the city of refuge with its complex topos of escape and exile as Locke and The Woman travel through Barcelona, altered by the experience there and driven to depart for another destination. They cannot remain in the city. It provides only a hiatus for them. They may abide for some time, as do all the other characters under discussion here, but only temporarily.

Barcelona (Whit Stillman, 1994) is a romantic comedy featuring NATO and anti-NATO sentiment, “trade fair girls” and international sales of high speed motors, the politics of US intervention in Europe and around the world, and terrorist acts against US foreign installations and personnel. Again, Barcelona functions as a city of refuge – with characters moving through this topos rather than remaining within it. (The film ends with the main characters in the United States.) However, Stillman’s use of juxtaposition here is closer to Allen’s in Manhattan than it is to Allen’s use of Barcelona in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Stillman’s film opens with the march “Americans Abroad” (Mark Suozzo) playing over a brief credit sequence. The soundtrack shifts to the up-tempo “Barcelona Merengue” (Mark Suozzo) as the film cuts to the opening title,

Barcelona, Spain

The last decade of the Cold War.

The image fades in to an establishing shot of the city from the harbor to the mountains, revealing the upward slope of Barcelona from the Balearic Sea to the Cordillera Costero Catalana (including Montserrat Mountain). The next shot cuts to a view from a building over the rooftops looking toward the sea. Another cut to an overhead shot shows the empty street in front of “The American Library, Barcelona.” Over the merengue, an explosion, and a cloud of black smoke from the library’s upper windows envelops the American flag hanging in front. The merengue continues across a fade as the smoke becomes powder, the windows a mirror, and we see Marta in a brassiere before the mirror applying make up. A shirtless Ramon enters the frame of the mirror. In the reflection, we see him take Marta’s chin in his fingers, study her face, and pronounce, “Perfecto.” A cut to a street and a shop window with a display for IBM replaces the mirror. A young man throws a brick through the shop window, shattering it. A sign on the back wall of the display reads, “La calidad de IBM no es noticia. El precio, sí” (the quality of IBM is not news. The price is). Cut to the promenade in front of the National Museum of Art of Catalonia and the “trade fair girls” in their black hats, black skirts, and bold red jackets walking to work. One smiles as she walks into close up before the camera and looks off screen toward Ted, the Chicago-based salesman who will become the narrator of the film. Ted enters the frame and turns repeatedly to watch the trade show girl walk away as the merengue softens.

In this opening sequence of just over two minutes, Barcelona stages the city as an intersection of aesthetics, politics, erotics, and economics, recalling the relations of the city of refuge in its expanded understanding. Barcelona here marks the violence of the city of refuge, on public and private levels. Through the juxtaposition of its audio and visual channels, the film stages a relation between beauty and violence that deploys the duality of its location – harbor and mountains, trade fair and back street with anarchist graffiti, foreign consul and local bar – without locating a final judgment within the topos. The function of Barcelona in Barcelona is to maintain the juxtaposition as a dynamic between beauty and violence, foreign and domestic in order to demonstrate the relationship between them on multiple levels. This marking of violence arises in a more subtle manner in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, where domestic violence and “romantic” violence dominate the narrative, and larger violent implications are only suggested (especially through the character of Juan Antonio’s father, and his refusal to publish his poetry because of his hatred of the world). The violence of Vicky Cristina Barcelona remains the violence of the bedroom, of lovers’ quarrels, or of unbalanced relationships. The violence of Barcelona is located on a much larger scale. While they focus on different levels of violence, though, both films display the link between beauty and violence through a display of an ambivalent topos of Barcelona.

Further, while it is tempting to see Barcelona as a simple essay on repression and liberation, where Ted and Fred mark childish polar opposites who find adulthood through synthesis of each other’s personalities, the film’s topos shows again how refuge is repression and liberation, containment and release, exile and escape. There is no either/or to synthesize here but always ambivalence – pleasure and grief. Such duality is signaled within the film by the presence of the two main characters (who echo through Vicky and Cristina in Allen’s film), the humorous references to sadomasochism and other sexual attitudes bantered about, the somber passing of the motor corporation into the hands of two leaders, and the marriage of foreign and domestic that does not resolve into some “cosa de gringos,” despite what Ted and Fred tell themselves at the end of the film. In fact, the ending of the film demonstrates how much Ted and Fred have not changed (matured) from the beginning of the film as they continue to state their opinions about others as if they are correctly deduced rather than only assumptions. In Barcelona, one must abide in the between time and place, whether in the time of a vow (such as Ted takes to date only plain-looking women) or the coma (such as after Fred is injured in the shooting). One abides in Barcelona, suffers in Barcelona, even if in the end Barcelona is transported to a cabin in the woods in the United States and remains the topos and never the utopia.

Todo Sobre mi Madre (All About My Mother, Pedro Almodóvar, 1999) is the first film Almodóvar set outside Madrid. This other man of La Mancha became famous for his intense development of the topos of Madrid in his films throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Then, at the end of the 1990s, Almodóvar turned toward Barcelona and with that turn developed a new relationship with time and place, intertextuality, character, and location, and the duality of cities of refuge. This change echoes the change of Allen’s filmmaking as he moved from Manhattan to London to Barcelona as well, especially as he shifted from juxtaposition to a mirroring of character and setting. For Almodóvar, this mirroring is made explicit through a blending of billboards and larger-than-life imagery of characters, some of whom stand directly before super-size images of themselves and through the “trans” aspects of Barcelona and the characters who abide there. In this way, Barcelona is the most transient topos Almodóvar has deployed, and Barcelona his most transient city.

Travel in Todo Sobre mi Madre is time and space travel. As characters travel between Madrid and Barcelona, they travel forward or backward in time. Memory and experience merge with location, and the tunnel between the two cities functions to relocate characters in their own understanding of their surroundings as much as to move them from place to place. Everything in Barcelona is blending, mirroring, merging, transitioning. Transgendered characters, stage actors, and kinship bonds reflect the logic of the tunnel, where relating becomes possible only through relating between and ambivalence is the norm. The between-space/time is the relationship, neither one side nor the other. In this way, Barcelona’s refuge reworks the refuge of Almodóvar’s Madrid (and especially Pepa’s apartment in Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Almodóvar, 1988) – which reflects Allen’s Manhattan more closely) – for the mother Manuela, the father Estéban, and Rosa (who takes refuge in Manuela’s apartment). Barcelona functions as a city of refuge as in these other films as its topos invokes safety and danger (Manuela’s first arrival among the prostitutes), escape and confinement (for Manuela and Rosa, who is confined to her bed in Manuela’s apartment), and protection and punishment.

From the moment Manuela arrives in Barcelona, the city’s topos as city of refuge between escape and exile is made clear and its ambivalence pronounced. After her son is killed in a car accident, Manuela travels to Barcelona to inform Estéban’s father and to remove herself from life in Madrid. Manuela travels to Barcelona, in part, to seek at least a temporary solace from her grief. However, the moment she arrives in Barcelona, Manuela finds herself rescuing her friend Agrado (a trans sex worker) from a physically abusive client. Agrado is thrilled to reconnect with Manuela, even under such dangerous circumstances. Barcelona is pleasure and grief, violence and beauty. It is a location of cultural sophistication (theater, architecture, music, cafés) and sexual and embodied complexities. Yet, it is also a topos that includes drug abuse, street violence, and HIV/AIDS.

Eventually, Manuela’s apartment in Barcelona becomes a site of refuge within the city of refuge. While the outside spaces of the city may remain ambivalent, this inside space (like others in Almodóvar’s work) seems to offer safe haven, in part because it is an all-female space. Interestingly, this inside/outside divide is a departure from the other films under discussion in this study. No other film makes such a firm break between inside/outside, where at least one inside space, such as an apartment, is an unambivalent haven. In fact, it might be argued that it is exactly this failure to provide any inside/outside divide, where inside might be safer from outside threats, that marks the topos of the city of refuge so ambivalently. Within the refuge of Barcelona in the other films discussed here, the inside is no safer and often more dangerous than the outside, especially when the gloss of domestic space is wiped away – such as in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Biutiful. Todo Sobre mi Madre, though, seems to argue for a refuge within the city of refuge.

Biutiful (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2010) is a drama about the underclasses in Barcelona, regardless of where they come from: Africa, China, Spain. Among the films of this study, it is the most literal depiction of the city of refuge of these films and the one that most connects refuge, economics, social justice, and the ambivalence of refuge. It is also the film that most marks the structural dilemma of refuge as ambivalence, one which cannot be overcome simply by the right actions of of one character. In fact, as the film suggests, the right actions of any one actor within the structure of refuge may lead to even more grievous outcomes for others within the city. In Biutiful, Barcelona is also an open city, accessible to natives, foreigners, or travelers, regardless of whether they have killed or cheated natives, foreigners, or travelers. As such, it is an overt example of the city of refuge as Levinas and Derrida describe it. If the function of Barcelona in Barcelona and Todo Sobre mi Madre seems closest to that of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, then the function of that topos in Biutiful seems on the surface the most distant from it. However, comparing the two films opens the question of the function of both deployments as cities of refuge. As radically different as this drama and romantic comedy may be, their intersections are telling.

While both films focus on transience through Barcelona, the statuses of their characters as tourists, students, immigrants, street workers, artist-wanderers, or migrant workers, reveal the differences of transience. Work in the city of refuge is predominantly offscreen in Vicky Cristina Barcelona while it is the primary focus of onscreen time in Biutiful. And while work provides a certain sumptuous life and provides a certain romantic lifestyle in the former, its relation to poverty, vulnerability, and the threat of death are marked in the latter. This link between work and death is highlighted in the film through workers who die because of dire working conditions and the irresponsible actions of employers (including Uxbal’s attempt to alleviate some of their suffering). It is also marked by the work Uxbal does as a medium between the living and the dead. Indeed, it is Uxbal’s role as paid medium that further marks the ambivalence of the city of refuge, as even ghosts in the film can only stay so long there and must eventually leave. Life, work, and death are transitions through which people and ghosts move, experiencing pleasure and grief, with no promise of rest, only escape and exile. If in Vicky Cristina Barcelona characters are called to find themselves or a purpose to their lives beyond the ordinary, in Biutiful characters seem already to be there but to have discovered that being there is still only a point from which one begins the next quest. In this way, Biutiful may recall Don Quixote’s quests more than the other films in this discussion.

One significant link between Biutiful and Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the acting of Javier Bardem in both: as Uxbal in the former and Juan Antonio in the latter. In both films Bardem plays men who live above the fray, despite the fact of their broken relationships, or, at least, what seems to be above the fray at first. Both men – one a hustler dying of prostate cancer, the other an artist who has stolen much of his technique – operate outside the mainstream of their worlds economically, socially, and morally. Uxbal is the petty criminal with the heart of gold and a supernatural connection with ghosts. Juan Antonio is the charming bohemian who claims to love humanity and want to find all the pleasure he can in life. Despite the differences in genre, the ways in which both men are positioned vis-à-vis the city of Barcelona is telling. They both move between background and foreground. They both merge with architecture and surroundings at different times. Uxbal is a tragic character whose actions lead to the death of those he is trying to help. Juan Antonio is a pathetic character who cannot break the cycle of his relationship with Maria Elena. Despite these differences, though, ultimately both characters end as failures. The stakes in Biutiful are elevated by the presence of Uxbal’s dependent children, and while the final moods are different in degree, they are not different in kind. Biutiful and Vicky Cristina Barcelona are connected through their topos as cities of refuge where all the characters escape to be exiled.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is Woody Allen’s second film set outside New York and the United States. (The first being Match Point (2005), set in London.) It tells the story of two American women abroad for the summer: one to study Catalan culture, the other to find herself. Among other aspects, two points of the film highlight, especially, the deployment of Barcelona as the ambivalent city of refuge in this film and bring together many of the points raised throughout this discussion: the film’s title song, “Barcelona,” and the brief scene in the amusement park about halfway through the film. These elements bring together the transience of refuge and the ambivalence of this relation between pleasure and grief.

The film opens with the song “Barcelona,” by Giulia y los Tellarini, a group that combines French chanson, tango jazz, and Latin boleros, playing over the credits and into the first scene of the women arriving at the airport. From the start, audio and visual will be merged, not in juxtaposition but to complicate the address of the film and the function Barcelona within its topos. The title song does not make clear if “Barcelona” is the subject of address or the object of discussion in the song, and its form and content highlight the very ambivalence of refuge that is Barcelona in this film. The song moves between blaming Barcelona for mixing pleasure and grief and warning Barcelona of the transience of “her” relation to both. The singer’s heart aches because of the pain Barcelona has brought her or because she sympathizes with the pain Barcelona experiences. The singer must move on, she says, “I will only be able to experience you/ From a distance/ And write you/ A song./ I love Barcelona.” Being too close, remaining in proximity is not a choice. Through this ambivalent address and ambivalence of emotional affect, the song marks the pleasure and grief of Barcelona as well as its invocation of the transience of refuge. From the start, this trope of merged address and object becomes a theme of the film as the title itself refers both to the story of Vicky and Cristina as well as to a tale addressed to Vicky and Cristina in this city of refuge, which will allow them to escape only to exile them and in the end return them to the very airport from which they arrived. In the song, Barcelona is a powerful lover who cannot be loved. In the film, Barcelona is the abode that cannot be abided.

Por qué tanto perderse Tanto buscarse Sin encontrarse? Me encierran los muros De todas partes.	Why so much losing oneself, So much searching oneself, Without finding oneself? The walls close in on me from all sides.
Barcelona. Te estás equivocando. No puedes seguir inventando Que el mundo sea otra cosa Y volar como mariposa.	Barcelona. You are mistaken. You cannot keep ignoring That the world may be something other And fly like a butterfly.
Barcelona. Hace un calor que me deja Fría por dentro, Con este vicio De vivir mintiendo. Qué bonito sería tu mar, Si supiera yo nadar.	Barcelona. There is a heat that leaves me Cold inside, From this vice Of living a lie. How beautiful would be your sea, If I knew how to swim.
Barcelona. Mi mente tan llena De cara de gente extranjera – Conocida, desconocida – He vuelto a ser transparente No existo más.	Barcelona. My mind is full Of the faces of strangers – Known, unknown – And back to being transparent, I no longer exist.
Barcelona. Siendo esposa de tus ruidos, Tu laberinto extrovertido, No he encontrado la razón Por qué me duele el corazón. Porque es tan fuerte, Que solo podré vivirte En la distancia Y escribirte Una canción. Te quiero Barcelona.	Barcelona. Being married to your sounds, Your extroverted labyrinth, I have not found the reason Why my heart aches. Because the pain is so strong, I will only be able to experience you From a distance And write you A song. I love Barcelona.
¡Ella tiene el poder! ¡Ella tiene el poder! ¡Ella tiene el poder! Barcelona es poderosa.	She has the power. She has the power. She has the power. Barcelona is powerful.

At first glance, the amusement park might stand as a refuge within the city of refuge of Barcelona. However, as much as the title song highlights the ambivalence of the film through the audio tracks, the amusement park scene, as short as it is, does the same for the visual and compositional elements of the film. Thus, the park recalls and critiques the topos of the apartments in Almodóvar’s films. Even more than the architecture put on display in the film, the amusement park is the visual and compositional signifier of the ambivalence and complexity of Barcelona.

Over a montage of different rides and attractions at the park, the narrator explains, “The amusement park was everything Juan Antonio led them to believe. It was antique and charming and overlooked all of Barcelona.” Spanish guitar plays on the soundtrack, as we see the couples in different permutations enjoying cotton candy, a carousel, or other park attractions. In the background remain the issues that complicate these relations, especially the secret affair between Juan Antonio and Vicky. The park not only “overlooks” the city – recalling the gondola in Professione – but is, in a way, Barcelona in miniature and the scene functions as a mise en abyme for the film’s display overall of the city as city of refuge. The amusement park is romantic, friendly, peaceful, fun. It is sensuous and thrilling while also comforting. It is how Barcelona (and Oviedo) is portrayed throughout the film. Yet, the amusement park is also like Barelona (and Oviedo) in the inverse as well.

As the scene continues, we overhear Juan Antonio and Vicky talking on a balcony overlooking the amusement park, with all of Barcelona in the background. They discuss the confusing incident from lunch where Juan Antonio mistakenly brushed Vicky’s foot with his, and the future of their relationship. Juan Antonio states that he is now with Cristina and that Vicky is to marry Doug. Perhaps in the future, he suggests, they may meet again, but for now, their relationship is over. Soon after, Vicky marries Doug, and they leave on a short honeymoon. Again, the conversation and narrative emphasize the transience and ambivalence that surrounds the characters, even in the amusement park. There is no refuge outside time and space, no refuge here from the pleasure and grief. There is only the hiatus in the in-between time and place. The adventures in the amusement park, rather than resolving the ambivalence of refuge, repeat it, and perhaps only leave the characters better for having seen that place that overlooks the whole of the city.

Allen’s Barcelona, like so many others, is the Barcelona of architecture and the visible, as well as the audio and the compositional. If Manhattan “conjures up a city of Gershwinian sublimity,” Vicky Cristina Barcelona creates a topos of Gaudí and Miro. It is a city of color, of curve, of indirect paths. Indeed, if Allen’s Manhattan is a habitat, then his Barcelona is an abode. You wait in Barcelona, you abide in Barcelona, but only temporarily, and even Doug functions – when we first see him – to recall us to Manhattan. Almost every character stays with someone in Barcelona, as guests and hostages, and the ones who live alone are questioned about their solitary arrangements. In fact, Juan Antonio’s father in Oviedo, who lives alone, is said to, “hate the world.” He may be the only character who remains habituated in time and place. Like other films set in Barcelona, the mise-en-scène of Vicky Cristina Barcelona is filled with Gaudí architecture: the cathedral, the park, facades, etc. As many critics have noted, the characters almost merge with the city itself. (Some critics have noted especially how, in the photography shoots, Maria Elena merges with the very walls of the city she it shot against. The line between character and setting in this topos disappears.) Yet, this merger is always only temporary, like the good days of the relationship between Juan Antonio and Maria Elena or the happy times of the threesome of Juan Antonio, Maria Elena, and Cristina. Barcelona, city of refuge, is never a city of permanence, certainty, or habit. It is a topos of refuge precisely because characters remain positioned against the city yet over, above, outside it.

Cities of Refuge

Set in Barcelona

Barcelona, New York, Barcelona