Henry James in Barcelona

Rating: 6/10 (16 January 2011)

Woody Allen has contrived a contemporary version of a Henry James or Edith Wharton story of Americans in Europe. Like those two great American writers it hinges on polarities. The Americans are opposite of the Europeans, in this case Spanish, it leads to humor, misunderstanding and occasionally something illuminating in the way each society behaves. It also tends to rely on cliché, a word Allen employs often as criticism, but it is present here, although it is a sophisticated cliché.
Just like James and Wharton the exposition of American morals, in all spheres, and with it, a wry critique of American philistinism is engaging. Vicky is all puritan accomplishments and rational objectives; Cristina is adventurous, and as the pompous husband of Vicky says, she is contemptuous of the American bourgeois life-plan.
The criticism of philistinism is apparent in the lifeless and materialistic way the American characters talk: the house they have Vicky and Doug have planned for instance, but mostly it is in the foreignness and otherness of art in Barcelona, they must acquire, possess, learn about it, it in a way that is absurd to the Spanish who live with it. The father poet of Juan Antonio who will not publish anything as an example of an artistic life lived without the materialist aim of money and book sales. It's an American stereotype of a European, which is just another but fancier cliché. And the tempestuous relationship between Juan Antonio and Maria Elena is an extended Latin stereotype that might have been taken from an olive oil commercial.
The most curious feature to the film is the voice over, written with care in real prose. Again, it might have been take from James. While it adds layers to characters and insights into the drama beyond the camera, it distances the actions on-screen and betrays their motives. At the end it almost cheats the audience of what they have sat through.