Barcelona's Darkness

On Whit Stillman's most troubling film

The doomed bourgeois of Barcelona: Ted, Montserrat, Fred, and Marta

At first glance, Whit Stillman’s 1994 film Barcelona looks like an intelligent comedy about shallow people, distinguished from Stillman’s other films by its political subtext. Set during the early 1980s—in “the last decade of the Cold War”—the film tells a relatively uncomplicated story …