A playful and sensual trip to Woody Allen's Spain

Rating: 7/10 (20 March 2009)

Woody Allen made himself a prolific, global film director with his humor from the New York scene, his satire on the Jewish life and all its highly enjoyable neurotic characters who concerned over and over about the themes of love and romance. In his latter career he has turned his nose away from New York and to Europe, making three films back-to-back in Britain, he makes another environmental change with his latest feature and travels to Spain, and its Barcelona. Once there, we're given a peachy story full of gorgeous Southern European life. Javier Bardem plays Juan Antonio, a ravishing, passionate painter that seduces the double-entry of Vicky (Rebecca Hall), who's there to give further studies to the Catalanian language, and Christina (Scarlett Johansson), who's exploring her artistic abilities. They soon learn about his ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz), a woman who stabbed him with a knife before leaving him, and who sooner or later will return like fireworks.
'Vicky Christina Barcelona' is a lush experience, with a soft-focus lens Woody creates a sensual and humid touch to the characters who mostly flirt, discuss, makes love and fight - the main ingredients of romance. Woody lends us a voice-over narration that explains the many narrative plot-holes, and so he paces through the hot summer days of Spanish landscape with the characters going along, making for important but also less important, but not necessarily less enjoyable, dialogs and interactions. And when Cruz's Maria Elena shows up, the film sparks a new flare. She's a firework of everything we thought we knew and didn't know about the great actress - just listen Bardem and Cruz exchange love and hate in the language of Woody Allen, in both English and Spanish, it's fabulous! 'Vicky Christina Barcelona' is what Woody Allen loves the most; observing romance, and what we humans make of it, and don't make of it.