Chinese? Why?

Rating: 4/10 (3 September 2016)

The first pitfall of Vicky Cristina Barcelona is Christopher Evan Welch as the droning, omnipotent narrator. The voice-over is not an inherently bad thing to use in a film; used incorrectly it can be disastrous, but with some thought it can be a wonderful addition. If you've seen Allen at his best, then you've seen Annie Hall, and how perfectly utilised it was in that film. In Radio Days, Allen's voice-over took on a wistful, nostalgic perspective of the past, and you could feel the longing in his recount. But here it not a character or persona, barely even a tool, but simply a way of bridging the gaps of the plot and acting as a substitute for the emptiness of the characters. It pipes up whenever Allen has been too lazy to fully visualise a thought or characteristic. We are told that Juan Antonio opens up on his passion through his paintings to Cristina, but it means nothing coming from some bored voice offscreen while the pair walk aimlessly on screen around the room.
One of Allen's early forays into Europe sees the film utilise the picture-perfect postcard definition of Barcelona to its fullest extent. This is not the dreary New York skyline that Allen is so familiar with, where the characters are more striking than their surroundings. This is Europe and its broadest, vaguest and most exotic; the palette is awash with sun-kissed reds, oranges, browns and yellows, and Allen drenches each unspoken moment with a generous dose of Flamenco strings. It is a full-blown and unashamed fetishisation of the country's tendency for fleeting cultural and spiritual transformation, much like Coppola did with the neon-streaked Tokyo. A slightly sour note; Allen's Match Point was partially funded by BBC Films and turned out like a tourist's documentary, and the same thing has happened with this film. There must be no negative depictions or connotations in this version of Barcelona - which means the end result is every facet of the setting serving the character's emotional arcs (rather than existing in its natural state). The slum kids are merely an avenue for Cristina's artistic endeavours, but even they are brushed off for 'better' material.
But Allen doesn't stop there. The vacation might have been uneventful if not for the timely intervention from Bardem's Juan Antonio, local artist and lover. He is a fine actor reduced to a pretty face by both the film and Cristina, whose attractiveness and exotic accent shoulder the burden for his character. Bardem offers good looks and empty ideas, at one stage descending to the level of a teenage boy on prom night, suggesting that sex is the one true way of really discovering one's inner feelings. The film isn't actually interested in his art or passions, because they are simply a device used to contrast the boring conventionalities of the Americans and their culture (and the cardboard cutout that is Doug - even his name is ordinary). He is joined by ex-wife Maria Elena, who is Penelope Cruz at her stormiest and most tempestuous. Allen falls easily into lazy stereotyping; the pair are hot-blooded and equally hot-tempered lovers who cannot spend more than a moment together without either making love or tearing each other's hair out, and they have the strange ability to make American women flustered and instantly weak at the knees. The odds are so ridiculously stacked against them - see how Cristina's 'Chinese' is contrasted with the flurry of Spanish that they pair exchange. And who wants aspirin when you can massage the soul directly, whispering sensually and vaguely on how to exorcise its demons!
It seems impossible to imagine Vicky and Cristina as acquaintances, let alone friends. Allen pushes them to opposite ends of the spectrum, allowing for no middle ground. When Juan Antonio spontaneously propositions the pair of them, Vicky is offended while Cristina jumps at the opportunity. The blonde unsubtly admires his looks from a distance, and immediately dubs him as 'interesting'. It is Johansson's attractiveness working against her, as it did often in her early career. She was pegged as the blond beauty in Match Point, but had no other allure, which made the affair rather unexciting (unsurprisingly one of her best performances is a voiced one). And here she falls into cliché - these girls are always the aspiring (or struggling) actress types (she's made a 12-minute short about the impossibilities of love - no prizes for guessing how many tripods were involved in that production, or who the lead was) - airy and sexy all rolled into one. Ironically the film doesn't even deliver on that front. There is nothing sexy at all about Bardem and Johansson swallowing each other's mouths in an unbroken closeup for twenty uncomfortable seconds. The ending, if anything, salvages what little is left of this wreck. It concludes in perhaps the only way it could, by seeing Vicky and Cristina return to normalcy after their adventure. We've all experienced the depressing low after the orgasmic vacation high, so we know that it can't last forever.