Dream Lands Hollywood Paints Unreal Picture Of Faraway Places

‘Boy, after seeing ‘Evita,”’ a colleague said to me the other day, “I really want to go to Buenos Aires.”

“Unfortunately,” I told him, not doing well by Aerolineas Argentinas, “most of it was filmed in Budapest.”

“Well,” he bounced back quickly, “then I want to go to Budapest.”

Listen. It is generally not a good idea to plan your travels with the help of Hollywood. They don’t, or at least didn’t, call it “the dream industry” for nothing.

“Evita” is far from the first movie to engage in urban sleight of hand. In the ‘80s, “Amadeus” was filmed in Prague because the Czech capital looked more like 18th century Vienna than 20th century Vienna did. Were it filmed today, Prague would have to be scrapped - logoed as it is now with Pizza Huts and Benettons - for … what? Kiev? Cluj? A back lot at Universal?

It is not really in the loss of original streets and buildings that Hollywood goes astray, but in the absurdly romantic gloss with which it insists on coating everything. This past summer I went to see “Big Night,” curious to see a familiar place - the Jersey shore in the 1950s - in an unfamiliar spotlight.

Well, there weren’t a lot of exterior shots: a few quick views of two-story brick row houses more reminiscent of South Philadelphia than Asbury Park.

But what really grated were the characters: Minnie Driver, Isabella Rossellini, with absolutely no effort made to get them to look like a small-town bobby soxer and homemaker (the two predominant female types in ‘50s Jersey). Much of my enjoyment of the film was ruined by my constantly wondering what these two foreign movie stars were doing at the Jersey shore. You could have walked the Ocean City boardwalk every night from 1950 to 1959 and never seen a woman who looked remotely like them.

More recently I went to see “The English Patient.” “The photography!” everyone had told me. “As a travel writer you’ll love it.”

I have never been to the Sahara, but I’ve read my T.E. Lawrence and I thought the cinematic desert looked a little precious. Example: When the dust storm hit, I marveled at its beauty, I didn’t imagine grains of sand between my teeth.

And what designer dreamed up the count’s digs in Cairo? Wood slats letting in bands of honeyed sunlight, the arched window framing perfectly a distant minaret and dome. “Love and death,” my friend remarked as we left the theater, “at Banana Republic.”

I am sensitive to the atmospherics of movies because that is one of the main reasons I go to them. I have passed on a number of apparently good films - “Kiss of the Spider Woman” comes immediately to mind - because I knew my chances for landscapes and street scenes were woefully thin.

I tend to think of movies as a substitute for travel (which explains why I almost never go to movies when I’m traveling). The trick is to get away from Hollywood.

In his low-budget road picture “Stranger Than Paradise,” Jim Jarmusch deftly showed that bleakness knows no geographical boundaries: Without hyperbole, he made roadside Florida look as grim as wintry Cleveland. And in “Salaam Bombay!,” Mira Nair took us on a picaresque journey using a real street kid as our guide.

But to capture a place, films need not resemble documentaries. Perhaps the greatest “travel” movie of all time is Federico Fellini’s “Roma,” an exuberant, stylized love letter to the great director’s favorite city. In one unforgettable vignette, a man eating spaghetti at a sidewalk trattoria refuses to move his table off the tracks of a stalled street car, rages, relents, and then, as soon as the car passes, defiantly moves his table back and resumes his meal. You learn more about Italy in that one scene than you do about Argentina in all of “Evita.”

These directors aimed for truth, not dazzlement, and through their genius they artfully achieved both. You watch the grainy black-and-white shots of Paris in Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” and you physically ache to be there. And when you are, you find it - even today - very much as he promised.