Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Film: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Director: Woody Allen
Starring: Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz.
Rating: ***
In the relative salad days of the 70’s Woody Allen demonstrated, through the misleading filter of his moribund introspection, the essential joie de vivre inherent in a wealth of intimate pleasures: the austere film-making of Ingmar Bergmann and Yiddish humour of Groucho Marx; the filthy fleshpot of New York, the batting of Willie Mays which illuminated it and the music of Gershwin which seemingly characterised its particular rhythms. This is to name but a few of the disparate points of reference, the personal consolations of philosophy that underpinned the remarkable Annie Hall and Manhattan. These films, to a certain extent at least, reinvented the wheel, providing a nascent blueprint for future romantic comedies and light drama. Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the latest comeback of a legendary auteur, offers no similarly Promethean fire-setting; it provides a piece of unbridled escapism that is as enjoyable as it is ultimately shallow.
The one thing of which we can be certain is that Allen, well into his ‘distinguished grey’ phase, still appreciates an irresistibly cosmopolitan set-up when he sees one. It is always a profound comfort to be reminded that thirty years of turbulence doesn’t leave everything violently altered in its wake. Whereas we would have, once upon a time, been left to muse upon shady, skyscraper-ed cityscapes or the face of Diane Keaton, VCB showcases a late-flowering, appropriately Eurocentric sensibility. At its best the film’s visual makeup, especially the montages of urban Catalonia, is delectably visceral and honeyed, a filmic homage to the iridescent Miró’s and candle-drip Gaudi’s that lend a bit of local colour. At its worst, we are reminded of an advertisement for reasonably-priced family hatchbacks; the Renault Miró, the Citroen Gaudi. VCB reveals an old man still very much in love with art and life, but exhibiting at times the naïve sentiments of the gap-year romantic; armed with guide book and a host of half-baked illusions and ultimately immune to the truth that lies beyond.
The plot is thin-ish; grounded, betrothed Vicky (Hall) and her impulsive, wayward friend Cristina (Johansson) spend a summer in Barcelona, where they both fall for the seductive charms of an exotic artist (Bardem). Whoever first said that ‘two’s company and three’s a crowd’ obviously cut little ice with Allen, as he belatedly introduces the artist’s estranged ex-wife (Cruz) into the fray. The resultant machinations allow for a great deal of stilted ‘Woody-speak’, his once abundant gift for truly witty patois having abandoned him, and a load of old-chestnut assertions concerning the relative difficulties of loving and being in love, monogamy and polygamy. Fortunately, as Keats understood when writing, in the Endymion, that ‘a thing of beauty…will never pass into nothingness’, Allen retains an abiding instinct for a gorgeous image. I plead erudition, and make no excuses for citing fragments of the sublime in mitigation for an average film. Just as there is no satisfactory synonym in English for ‘beauty’, there is no necessary substitute, in this case, for Bardem’s whispered baritone and dusky eyes, Johansson sitting by the sea alone, stoically contemplating her future, or Cruz with a cigarette dangling insouciantly from her lips. In the event, it is Cruz who steals the plaudits, turning in a supporting performance worthy of her Oscar win. Her Maria Elena makes the film worth a second watch almost on her own: a raging, feline femme-fatale, tossed with disinterested good fortune and landing with spring-heeled grace amongst an ensemble of startled cardboard cut-outs. She is a worthy addition to Allen’s long line of well-written, strong if neurotic women, and every inch the prima inter pares under the late, Spanish sun of his imagination.
Loading ...