American girls are easy

Rating: 1/10 (14 March 2012)

I liked one third of this recent Woody Allen film, the Barcelona part. I've visited the city two or three times and shot in golden light, it's beautifully brought to the screen in all its Gaudi and Miro-Inflected glory.
Unfortunately his actors keep getting in the way of the scenery and worse they're talking the most pretentious nonsense and acting out the most ridiculous story you could imagine. It all starts in a Barcelona bar when two rich and supposedly intellectual adventure- seeking American tourists catch the eye of a swarthy Spaniard who immediately abandons the company he's keeping to proposition the pair of them by inviting them to join him on a private plane ride to Ovieda where he confidently asserts he will sleep with them both. Well girls, the Spanish word for "Police!" is "Policia", which is of course what anyone else would shout under the circumstances, but in Woody's world this is plot development so naturally they go with it and of course it duly happens. Did I mention that Javier Bardem as said Spaniard is a temperamental artist with a complicated love-life and that Scarlett Johannsen as the free spirit of the two girls is a short-film director-cum-photographer and that Rebecca Moore as the passive, vulnerable one has a degree in Catalan? So everyday, as ever in Allen's films. All the time he's with them, Bardem talks about about the stormy relationship he had with his ex-wife which is when you realise that Penelope Cruz must turn up soon and sure enough, she does, having failed in an overdose attempt and now keen to start a ménage-a-trois with Barden and Johannsen.
Okay, I can't write this anymore, my memory's hurting at the remembrance of it. This is an absolutely awful movie from a so-called master-director who has lost all sense of timing, finesse and skill. He even employs a narrator (again), an actor with a voice uncannily similar to his own younger-self to move the story along or tell us how his characters think, which in retrospect is helpful as the viewers need all the help they can get to follow the convolutions of the story here. If Woody wants to regale us for the umpteenth time about the relationship between the sexes, with a little twist contrasting western reserve and Latin passion, he has to do it with a better written, played and directed piece than this. It's an absolute mess, trite, contrived and about as far removed from reality as I am from the moon.
Oh and that little flamenco "Barcelona" number will drive you crazy too, by the end.