An hour into Whit Stillman’s 1994 film, Barcelona, the protagonist, Ted Boynton (Taylor Nichols), considers using “maneuver x” in his stalled romantic life. He’s an American working in the Spanish branch of an auto conglomerate, looking for love in the titular city’s post-Franco, sexually liberated nightlife. As Ted explains to his cousin Fred (Chris Eigeman) – visiting as an underqualified scout for a naval diplomatic mission – the sales tactic of “maneuver x” involves removing all pressure and allowing the customer to cross the threshold themselves.
No tricks, no cloying, no badgering. Fred thinks the move is just another way of “playing it cool”, and it’s a handy metonym for the film. Barcelona plays it very, very cool.
Which isn’t to say Stillman’s second film, after his Oscar-nominated Metropolitan, is itself cool. He opens conversations with “You know how at parties, everybody talks about marketing?” If you want cool, look to Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco, where Chloë Sevigny frequents an unnamed Studio 54. Barcelona, on the other hand, is my feelgood movie because it’s several movies in one.
An Austenesque romantic comedy, with wit dry as an albariño. A slow-boil cold war intrigue, where characters discuss the consequences of American foreign policy. A nostalgic, autobiographical portrait of young Americans abroad.
And, however improbably, a defense of business-section self-help books. Where Stillman’s contemporaries riffed on Death of a Salesman, he offers us Willy Loman’s Homage to Catalonia. The scope is both modest and international.
Two American cousins pursue love while endlessly debating and taxonomizing it. Stillman, who loves verbose characters like Scorsese loves needle-dropping the Rolling Stones, calls his films “moralistic identity comedies for young people”, and here he throws in US-Spanish relations and the locals’ hyperawareness of anything signifying fascism. The joke is that Fred’s Reagan-era patriotism strikes them as “facha”; in 2026, it’s no longer funny.
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