In the immortal words of the J. Geils Band: “You love her, but she loves him and he loves somebody else. You just can’t win.” Never was this platitude truer than in Woody Allen’s breezy and biting new comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
Rebecca Hall (The Prestige) and Scarlett Johansson (The Other Boleyn Girl) star as the titular women, two friends spending a summer in Barcelona with a friend. When a chance encounter with a swaggering Spanish artist, recent Academy Award winner Javier Bardem for his villainous turn in No Country for Old Men, leads them into a complicated cycle of passionate entanglements, the two American girls find themselves at odds with fiery circumstances beyond their control, most notably in the person of Penélope Cruz (Volver) as Bardem’s disturbed ex wife.
Like Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow before her, Scarlett Johansson seems to have become Woody Allen’s default choice to play untamed or adventurous women trapped in undesirable circumstances. Unlike past incarnations, however, Allen is seemingly poking fun at the neurosis present in these women that he used to celebrate in past films like Manhattan and Annie Hall.
Johansson’s Cristina is prone to bouts of discontent and imagines herself to be, “a European soul,” in the words of the film’s ever-present narrator. When Cruz’s character claws and scratches her way into the narrative, she sees right through Cristina’s poetry and discussions on the complications of love.
Cristina is a girl who likes to think she’s seen it all and remains unphased. She aspires to embody this “European soul” by being open to everything, ignoring her own heart and mind in the process. She is so committed to being completely free that she fails to see a pattern developing in her life. Bardem’s plays the part of European bohemian to great comic effect, drooping his eyelids and waving his hands in a way only found in the fantasies of travel fiction.
Hall, an up-and-coming British actress, sporting an impressive American accent in her highest profile part to date, wisely plays her character for drama, not mugging or attempting to underline the comedy inherent in her situation. Vicky begins the movie highly strung and ends it that way, only with a little more perspective for her trouble.
Highly touted for her performance after Vicky Cristina Barcelona screened at the Cannes film festival earlier this year, it is Cruz who steals the show. With her hair uncombed and a cigarette dangling from her lips, Cruz is delightfully unhinged. Whether she’s cooing to Cristina about passion or arguing with Bardem’s character, the audience’s attention remains on her.
What Allen is presenting her is dream Europe: a place where money is not an issue and wine flows as freely as tortured love.
Cruz and Bardem are still in love but can never be together. Hall is unhappily enagaged.
Patricia Clarkson, as the friend who puts the girls up for the summer, is trapped in a marriage but too afraid to leave.
To call it Woody Allen’s best film since Match Point isn’t saying much.
However, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is worth seeing if only to witness Allen’s typical neurotic characters go head-to-head with two fiery, uninhibited ones.
