‘Fated to become a cult classic’: why Barcelona is my feelgood movie

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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. Ted likes Glen Miller. 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. It’s the early 80s. 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. The incompetent diplomat, always primed for offense, would rise quickly in Trump’s administration. In the penultimate scene Fred orders a Cuba libre, so perhaps there’s hope?

As for the plot: characters fall in and out of love; they step on rakes. In a twist out of a Graham Greene novel, someone is violently attacked as a result of a misinformation campaign. The ugly Americans never understand how ugly they are, even if the film does. On a rewatch, note the extras’ silent reactions to Fred’s complaints. Though even he isn’t completely oblivious. After a disastrous picnic with an influential journalist, Fred tells his cousin: “I did not confirm their worst assumptions. I am their worst assumptions.”

Barcelona was fated to become a cult classic. It hit theatres during American independent cinema’s annus mirabilis and was pushed down critics’ lists by Pulp Fiction, Hoop Dreams and debuts from Kevin Smith, James Gray and Kelly Reichardt. Other films set in the Catalan capital make Stillman’s look drab by comparison. Take Almodóvar’s technicolor melodrama All About My Mother, from 1999, or Cédric Klapisch’s EU-philic sex comedy L’Auberge espagnole, from 2002. It also doesn’t help that most of the Spanish roles are played by Americans, Australians and Brits – though Mira Sorvino and Tushka Bergen are wonderful.

Perhaps feelgood movies, like cult classics, require the gift of time. If Barcelona is several films in one, it’s also several films over time. Pete Townshend once referred to Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone as “quantum”: its lyrics mean something wholly different to you at each decade of life.

When I was in college, Ted’s transcontinental lifestyle felt aspirational. To live abroad, besotted by locals while positing undercooked theories about love! I took its advice to heart, too. Sometimes it really is too early for dancing.

By my early 30s, having traveled a fair bit, I better understood Stillman’s caustic take on global politics. I could appreciate, too, his prescience. Wherever Americans discover romance and an asymmetric exchange rate, set the countdown to over-tourism. (I can confirm the gilda pintxo in La Boqueria is better than a dozen cheeseburgers.) And the American adventurism and Spanish anti-Nato isolationism remains sadly topical. Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” became gold flake stapled to the wall of the Oval Office.

Now, in my 40s, I empathize with the sentimental attachment to the film’s pre-globalized milieu. A time of all-night dancing, a rejection of the old order and dating without smartphones. The costume design has come back around, too. Ted’s preppy, oversize fits can be seen at Ralph Lauren, Noah and Jonathan Anderson’s Dior.

Barcelona still feels good because it’s uniquely of its time and of our time. Stillman created a film that’s knotty, ambiguous – but never ambivalent – and unafraid of confronting politics alongside its characters’ quotidian concerns. Perhaps indie cinema will make more like it. (Although I know Fred would say, “God, your naiveté is astounding!”) The director put it best: “[Y]ou can look at films with a critical eye, a skeptical eye, or just a sort of sit-back-and-enjoy-it eye.” The beauty of Barcelona is you can do all three at once, and over time. That’s quantum.