Vicky Cristina Barcelona(9/7/2008)
It’s no secret that Woody Allen is a remarkably prolific director; it’s something that Stanley Kubrick used to envy him for. It’s almost a law of physics that there will be a Woody Allen movie for every calendar year and he shows no signs of slowing down. When people think of Woody Allen movies they usually think of his “nebbish” character going around New York, dealing with relationships, and having intellectual discussions about life, then making fun of said conversations. The movies are still pretty much the same in this decade except Allen’s mostly been staying behind the camera and he’s now working in Europe instead of New York. The tour of Europe that Allen started with Match Point four years ago has mostly been good for him and his newest film, Vicky Christina Barcelona, will probably be remembered not only as the height of his European period; in fact it’s the best movie he’s made in at least fifteen years.
The film follows two young American women as they spend a summer in Barcelona. The first, Vicky (Rebecca Hall), is a straight-laced grad student who’s engaged to a promising businessman (Chris Messina) back home. The other is Cristiana (Scarlet Johansson), a self-styled free spirit who aspires to be an artist, though she has not chosen a medium to express herself with. When the two attend an art expedition they meet a somewhat eccentric Spanish artist named Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) who within minutes of meeting them invites them out to spend a weekend at his estate in Oviedo with the clear intention of bedding them. Vicky is not impressed but Cristina is intrigued by the notion of spontaneously running with an artist, Cristina wins out and they take the side trip. Over the course of the weekend Vicky and Juan form a bond, but it is with Cristina that he eventually starts a long term relationship. This relationship works quite well, but then his crazy ex-wife María Elena (Penélope Cruz) enters the picture which may or may not throw a monkey wrench into the gears of their relationship.
Most Woody Allen movies use satire to explore greater human themes; the themes explored in Vicky Christina Barcelona are youthful soul searching, culture clashes, and self destructive relationships. The first of these themes seems to be a surprising topic to be brought up by a director over seventy, but it’s also one that rings true. Vicky is a character who has her whole life mapped out in a very dispassionate but sensible way, but she lacks a certain passion. Cristina is the opposite, she’s spontaneous and open minded but in many ways naïve and without direction. Both are using this Barcelona trip as a means to find themselves and both will try to live with the other’s philosophy. The catch is, no one really “finds” themselves by running around Eurpoe, hell most people never “find” themselves, and Allen knows that the live of these two women aren’t going to be redefined over the course of a summer. That’s not to say that either are static characters, but their development is evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
Woody Allen really opened up opportunities for himself when he realized that there were plenty of pretentious intellectuals living outside of New York who were just as rife for satire. The Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz characters seem like the prototypical southern Europeans: they ooze confidence, open-mindedness, creativity, and fiery passion. The catch is, most real Spaniards don’t really cat like this, and they probably represent the whole of their culture about as accurately as Woody Allen’s persona represents New York. This type of heightened behavior is used to point out the differences between the two American leads and the people who enter their lives; it’s also the source of most of the movie’s comedy. Bardem’s frank sexual advances are quite funny, especially in the way the two women react to it, and Cruz’s wild anger is another comical element.
The third and probably most important theme is that of self destructive relationships. Life with these two crazy artists is interesting, wild, and fun, but I it doesn’t make for a stable relationship and it’s no way to live for more than a few months. The Bardem and Cruz characters are people who thrive on pure passion, but long term relationships need a lot more than that. The relationships Vicky and Cristina form with Juan Antonio are satisfying but there’s no future in them and they’ll eventually end up like Juan Antonio’s highly destructive relationship with María Elena. In this way the film reminded me in many ways of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, another film about an American who spends a long stretch of time with a pair of crazy hyper-sexual Europeans only to ultimately be driven away back to the comfort of a simpler life.
However, this is no love letter to monogamous stability either; the couple who are hosting Vicky and Cristina in Barcelona are held up late in the film as an example of a safe and stable relationship that is devoid of passion, and ultimately leading toward boredom and infidelity. It would seem that this is the kind of future in Vicky’s future if she marries the fiancé she choose because he was merely nice and was pleasant and had career prospects. So in many ways our heroines face a catch-22, the catch-22 faced by everyone looking for love: choosing passion can be messy and choosing stability denies people of true happiness. This is in many ways a fairly cynical take on relationships hidden beneath the surface of this seemingly light hearted film, which is a big part of why the film works so well, there’s real complexity to be found in a movie that plays as quality adult entertainment.
A major factor in the film’s success lays in the cast; this is an excellent example of a small cast where everyone seems to have just the right chemistry. Scarlett Johansson is an actress that can be hit or miss, but she works quite well here. Cristina is a character whose naiveté could have easily been very annoying, but Johansson manages to avoid this by avoiding any girlishness in the character, instead of coming off like a schoolgirl she manages to come off as a genuine free-spirit. Rebecca Hall, has the straight-man role here which would seem to be easier but it isn’t, she has some of the more thankless Woody Allen dialogue to deal with and she pulls it off quite well. Javier Bardem has a role that’s the exact opposite of his Oscar winning role in No Country For Old Men, in that film he had to be an emotionless sociopath but here he needs to be a wildly passionate artist. Of the four leads he’s probably the least noteworthy, but he still holds up his end of the ensemble. The real standout is Penelope Cruz, an actress who’s had a lot of trouble with English language roles in the past. Cruz does have a lot of Spanish dialogue here, but most of her lines are in English (at least when Juan Antonio has his way), and she pulls it off by letting her character not have the best grasp of the language either. This is the same trick Jackie Chan learned to use in the Rush Hour films, he built his character as someone who doesn’t speak perfect English and his accent seemed a lot more natural. That’s hardly the most important thing about her work here, she has a character that has even more raw passion than Juan Antonio, yet she keeps from looking like a complete lunatic while shouting at people.
It was recently announced that Woody Allen will be returning to New York to film his next project, presumably ending his European era. When I first heard this it seemed like a good sign, but now that I’ve seen this I realize how the change of location has helped freshen up Allen’s style. Woody Allen is such a prolific guy that it’s way too easy to take his work for granted, it’s easy to compare his latest movies to other Woody Allen movies and have them fall short when they should be comparing them to other romantic comedies playing now, with those standards it becomes clear just how much of a treasure the guy is. But his work here is above and beyond the call of duty even for Woody Allen, it lives up not only to other romantic comedy but also up to some of Allen’s own best work.
**** out of four
