A Bench in the Park

Eric Rohmer - veteran director of My Night at Maud's and Claire's Knee - is the clear inspiration for Spanish director Agusti Vila's first feature. The French master's preoccupations with chance, the difficulty of making choices, and self-delusion are all present in this lightweight comedy of manners. Alex Brendemühl plays Juan who becomes convinced love can only come from chance encounters after his longtime girlfriend departs for London. He therefore decides to divide his afternoons between a park bench and a bar stool, and soon finds himself unable to choose between spiky drifter Victoria Freire and scholarly Mónica López. While happy to let his three protagonists prattle on (which they do with some assurance), Vila can't resist employing a range of self-conscious camera movements, which neither capture the atmosphere of the scene nor the stunning Barcelona backdrops. Indeed, he succeeds only in exposing the flimsiness of this amiable but unremarkable anecdote.