Europeans are crazy and unhappy, but at least they're not dead

Rating: 6/10 (15 March 2010)

Vicky Christina Barcelona fits well into the "Woody abroad" genre that comprises pretty much any Woody Allen film not made in New York (correction: not made in Manhattan). Spain is a series of attractive tourist views, Spanish people are either having sex, looking steamy or gustating in a sexy way, so watch out any bland, parboiled American ingenues that happen to fall into this fragrant and meaty broth.
The film starts with the arrival of the eponymous heroines in the same city, all of which is told to us by a flat, sardonic narration that continues through the film, giving an air of Lars von Trier's Dogville to the piece: whatever happens on-screen is provided with a stark, dismissive description, the effect of which is to distance the action (which is schematic at best) even further from the viewer.
What does happen is an absurd intertwining of lusts, doubts and desires, which tease tall moody Vicky and blonde sexpot Christina into a frenzy around the irredeemably macho presence of Javier Bardem. As such it's not a bad effort: the girls loosen up under the Spanish sun, and Bardem hams it up as the unshaven, bacchanalian stereotype of masculinity. But the whole operation is so diagrammatic and so undercut by the cruel narration that you have to start wondering what Woody really thinks that he is doing.
That only really becomes apparent when Penelope Cruz hits the screen and saves the film. My god, I am really turning into a big Cruz fan. She seems to be capable of doing anything, saving anything, and here, as Bardem's ex-wife she breaks through the film's study of types with a performance that is as ridiculous as it is riveting. Somehow, despite her unbelievably exaggerated manner, she seems to be the only real person on the screen, while the others are just playing their parts.
So the film keeps going, people do stuff and the narrator's deadpan, snarky manner reminds us that it's all ridiculous, all pretty pointless really. When the film does finish, the statement it makes appears to be pretty bleak too. Vicky returns to America, to live with the husband that she does not love, Christina goes back too, still searching, having been unable to find satisfaction, even in a pre-lapsarian menage a trois.
I might be completely wrong, but it seems that the wider point that Woody is making is pretty unfavourable about his fellow Americans: Barcelona offers both girls a glimpse of how life can be, and both of them are too scared to seize it. The Spanish people in the film (who are of course cartoon Spaniards) by contrast carry on with their crazed, passion-filled existences. They might not be very happy, but they are very much alive.
I have to declare that I'm a very big Woody Allen fan and would be prepared to watch anything that he makes. Sometimes that leads to great pleasure (as in the classics of the late seventies and early eighties), and sometimes to confusion and boredom (as in the execrable Match Point, which I really hated). Vicky Christina Barcelona is neither a high water mark nor a low tide on that scale, but it is a work apart. It seems to be that it's a much darker work than most of Woody's output, a deeply alienated analysis of what is wrong with America, albeit through the means of desultory comedy. Without Penelope Cruz it would have been a lot darker still.