Woody's Euro Sex Caper

Rating: 8/10 (10 December 2008)

Compared to such somber, even bleak, recent Woody Allen movies as "Match Point" and "Cassandra's Dream," "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" has a good deal of humor. Yet to bill the film as a comedy - while no doubt shrewd marketing - is misleading both as to its quantity of chuckles and even more so in regard to its plot resolution. The film is not by any means a Hollywood style screwball romantic comedy, not even of the ironic failed romance variety that characterized such Allen classics as "Annie Hall" and "Manhattan."
Rather, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" is akin to many European and some American indie film adult sex comedies, focusing less on the boy-gets-girl removal of obstacles to idealized love and more on the foibles and vagaries of sexual attraction and human mating patterns. Such comedies are populated by flawed human beings whose choices in love reflect their own limitations and usually end in compromise or unhappiness  that is, realistically rather than romantically. Viewers prepared to accept this approach will really like "Vicky Cristina Barcelona"; those expecting a full resurrection of "funny Woody" may be disappointed.
The film's semantically curious title refers to its twenty-something central characters Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) along with its romance-inspiring setting (Barcelona). While on a visit to Spain, the American friends are invited to share the rather opulent Barcelona residence of Vicky's family friend (Patricia Clarkson). Vicky is doing research on "Catalan identity" for her Master's thesis and killing time waiting to be securely married to a Wall Street business type back in the States. Cristina is essentially a hot girl on a hot summer's night, looking for sexual adventure and not knowing where she's headed in life but wanting it to be (in Benjamin Braddock's term) "different."
Little time is wasted getting the plot moving as the young women soon meet and are aggressively "courted" by Juan Antonio, a bohemian Spanish painter (Javier Bardem). Cristina is immediately smitten but Vicky is standoffish, partly because she is engaged but mainly because she fears disruptive emotions. As one might expect, things get emotionally complicated and tangled among the threesome in short order. What one doesn't expect, though, is the mid-Act 2 entrance into the picture of Juan Antonio's divorced wife Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz). Maria Elena enters the scene like a force of nature, completely rewriting the chemistry of interaction among the principal characters and initiating a series of events - one more unpredictable and cataclysmic than the last that build to a resolution completely true to the characters although open and unsatisfying in the superficial Hollywood ending sense.
"Vicky Cristina Barcelona" is clearly Allen's tightest, most inspired screenplay in some time, maybe since "Husbands and Wives" in the early '90s. It is also his best job of casting since perhaps even earlier than that. As Vicky, relative newcomer Rebecca Hall ("The Prestige") plays a part that in the '80s and early '90s would have gone to Mia Farrow, but she plays it with a bare minimum of annoying imitation-Woody tics and has a much more appealing screen persona than Farrow usually managed to project. Scarlett Johansson's role is nicely limited to the small compass of her acting talent while tastefully exploiting her sensational sensuality. Javier Bardem, following his Academy Award turn as a ruthless hired killer and his stunning performance as a quadriplegic in "The Sea Inside," continues to demonstrate formidable range here in playing a complexly human character, even if his bedroom eyes are apparently more powerful than his artist's brush. And what can one say of Penelope Cruz's tour de force as Marie Elena? Stealing every scene, Cruz fully inhabits a breathtakingly beautiful character who is alluringly feminine, powerful, inspirational, and more than a tad crazy. The closest precedent to her character type I can recall is Jeanne Moreau's Catherine in Francois Truffaut's masterpiece "Jules and Jim."
In several other respects, including the extensive use of a narrator, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" resembles a rendition of "Jules and Jim" told from a female perspective  i.e. it resembles "Two English Girls," which is Truffaut's own version of "Jules and Jim" from a female perspective. One thing the three films certainly share is an image of love as a constant and shifting ménage a trois (or sometime a quartre!) Whether the connections to Truffaut were intended, I do not know. However, Allen has repeatedly expressed his life-long admiration for the European film masters of his youth: Bergman, Fellini, Godard, and Truffaut. The examples in his earlier work of the influence of the first three of these are plentiful. Perhaps it was time to take on Truffaut. If so, the initial results were happy indeed.