Love and Honesty, Existential Baggage and Self-Realization

Rating: 8/10 (7 August 2014)

THE ONLY BAD ELEMENTS OF THE MOVIE:
o- The cigarettes. They took up too much of the emotional interactions, and tainted the nearly perfect scenery of a beautiful, difficult exploration of very tender sentiments with filth.
o- The paintings composed by two of the main characters, Maria-Elena and Juan-Antonio. I suspect Woody Allen has the same opinion about that vacuous crap posing as "modern art", which is partly why Cristina's artwork is so much more profound, even though at the same time she's shown to be very insecure about it. I'm sad we only get to see very little of it, fleeting glimpses.
o- The ending.
THE REST OF THE MOVIE: It was great, though I have a really hard time forgiving the director for the "bad elements" described above! The way the movie was promoted when it first came out was terrible; it gave a really wrong impression through the promotional clips, "coming attractions", trailers, previews and posters: I vowed to boycott the movie for a few years and watch it only after the commercial and pseudo-intellectual fake excitement had passed.
And so it happened. I'm really glad I watched it - the movie is MUCH better than anything I expected! One element I'm really happy with is that there's a male main character who's actually good for a change, a person to look up to: Juan-Antonio is gentle, cultivated, has real depth, is honest, caring, tender, and even handles tremendously difficult, potentially lethal situations, with emotional flexibility that's guided by true love.
I'm sure that all the three main actresses will receive a lot of praise for portraying really well the primary characters who struggled with nearly impossible situations, handling them through very genuine personas.
It was clear that all four of them worked hard to portray with as much immediacy as possible feelings and behaviours which are either entirely outside the range of "acceptable normalcy" or totally perverted by male-chauvinism. But Scarlett Johansson and Javier Bardem took on extra burdens: what the movie demanded of them was to convey and bring to the surface aspects of being that only people who have struggled deeply with themselves can do. This is not to say that Penelope Cruz and Rebecca Hall did not act well - on the contrary, they were great! - but their roles demanded only parts of their conventional self, what comes easily and naturally to them.
I was really worried, before watching it, that the movie would have been an ode to the filthiest and sleaziest aspects of authoritarian and patriarchal perversions of male-chauvinist fantasy, "prettified" by Woody Allen into a pseudo-philosophical pretension. I'm so glad I was wrong! The movie really and honestly grapples with some of the most beautiful AND difficult aspects of polyamory - multifaceted relationships built on love, honesty and transparency - that it should probably be one of the first movies on the list of items for shared viewing and dialogue, especially for people who are new to the polyamory community. That dialogue is really needed badly by the community in order to feel itself closer to normalcy while it keeps expanding - pushing outwards - the limits of the "established order" under the present regime of Family, Private Property, the Church and the State.