The comic half of love stories

Rating: 8/10 (12 January 2009)

For sure Europe has made consistent changes in Woody's mind and all that's happening around him as an observer and as a misunderstood artist as well. Also seems that he wants to express it in a so intense way that all his best creative processes in the last 10 years are happening in Europe than when living in his loved Manhattan.
It's obvious why his mind seems so much more clear and his movies seems so more coherent now than before. Manhattan is a concrete jungle surrounded by chaos and cars and people crossing streets and a place where you can find anything anytime anywhere, but you will never be able to find answers for inner questions. So it's always the search for an inexistent thing. In Europe, as things happens a little slower and everything in that continent has a cultural explanation for everything, or an intense artistic feeling for every moment, that's why most of the artists find themselves crossing the ocean. And we can feel that happens to Woody.
I never appreciated his movies so much as now. Like I said, he seemed to me a totally chaos before Europe and now he seems a lot more coherent and expressive, and we are able to feel that. It's not like Woody is trying to be something else, he's there all the time with all his perfectionism and questionings, extracting from life the finner feelings that we are always trying to hide, but he is not that messy expressionist picture anymore.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona is one of his best works because he unified all his discussions thru the years in a loose movie that carries you naturally over his own ideas and personal questions and fears that we all heard before. For me, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the opposite of Match Point (2005), and both of them are what he was trying to express with Melinda And Melinda (2004) and its both sides of the same story, the comic one and the tragic one. While Match Point is the tragic one in London, VCB is the comic one in Barcelona. So, it was necessary two different movies in two totally different places to show what Melinda And Melinda fails a lot in Manhattan. But that is a totally Woody Allen thing, I mean... he never gives up an idea till the time he feels fully completed in satisfaction with it.
Also is very interesting why he chose Spain as background of the comic love stories, because that country represents all about love clichés and the appreciation of a good wine in bucolic warm places surrounded by colors and history. That is another huge twist in a career that always suited in inexpressive cold places filled with whisk.
But the most interesting fact of the movie - and each one of his European movies - is that there are always American characters searching for something outside their native country, and there are always other American characters always trying to push them back to that American way of life that those ones were trying to escape or forget someway. And that seems to me his consistent idea that no matter how better and creative he fells in Europe, there's always a foot in New York.
It's unfair talk about how much better are the actors or the characters separately because all of them has a whole importance in Woody's mind and how they were able to express it in his own artistic ways. But the actors here perform their characters with sincere brilliance and they are so consistent and well directed that is refreshing.
No doubt Woody keeps getting better and better thru the years and I'm rediscovering the pleasure to watch his movies all over again.