Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Woody Allen has done it again.  He has the ability to make one fall in love with his stories, his flawed characters, even his cinematographic choices.  Which is saying something, because even thinking the word “cinematographic” takes some degree of will power and endurance.  But if you’re willing to think along with Allen on this one, near the end perhaps of his storied career in filmmaking, you’re going to be glad you did, I think, because there is more to this one, as you might have guessed, than meets the eye.

Vicky and Cristina go to Barcelona for the summer, for different reasons, as we are told by the omniscient but disembodied narrator at the opening of the film, after Allen’s predictable opening credits, and this ethereal narrator stays with us, and with Woody, as he writes this film, giving him a reason to not use dialogue at all if he doesn’t want to, which, at times, seems like way too often.  It needs, and this is something not common to a Woody film, a little more self-awareness it seems sometimes, in order to understand the difference between telling a story and writing a Master Plots.  That being said, the narrator actually works fine for most of the movie, cutting out the fat, as it were, so that we the audience can enjoy the actual meat of the film, the characters’ important interactions, the ones that Woody really wants us to see, which all work quite well on a number of levels, since the acting is all around very good.

Vicky (Rebecca Hall) goes to Barcelona to get her Masters in Catalan Identity (let’s both admit we don’t know what that is), while Cristina (Scarlett Johannson again) goes to find wild, unorthodox love, and this after she has just made a 12-minute film on that very subject, which she describes as “a movie about how love is difficult to define.”  Poignant enough, since that seems to be what Vicky Cristina Barcelona is also about.  It doesn’t hit you too hard in the face, but it’s strong enough to make you question Woody’s venerable, if somewhat ulterior, motives.  They meet a man named Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), a painter, whose previous marriage to Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz) apparently ended with one of them or both almost dying.  That’s all we’re told at the beginning.  As the movie progresses, the sexual tension builds between all three main characters, and, given that she’s engaged, Vicky tries to resist.  Cristina does not.  Whatever their initial intentions, they each find that sex and love and romance are tempting, euphoric, and above all necessary for the human race to enjoy what we can of this life that “has no meaning,” according to Juan Antonio, a recurrent theme in most of Woody’s films.

The thematic structure, built right in to the movie’s dialogue, narration, and plot devices, is apparent and obvious, that one does not know exactly what one is looking for until one finds it, that love is blind, and that the curious deviations from what some people call normalcy works for some while others find those same deviations maddening, if not at the same time wantonly concupiscent.   Woody loves to tell stories of flawed people, trying to figure out their own existence in the midst of love, deceit, and, many times, lots of sex.  And personally, I love to hear him tell it.  Woody himself said one time, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it by not dying!”  I hope he achieves it one way or another, because he is a master story teller, and this movie, despite its minor flaws, is no different.

Rating: 3/4 Stars