Is Woody Allen serious? He apparently wants us to think so. Ever since “Annie Hall,” his films as writer-director have been peppered (lightly or heavily) with Big Themes, Philosophical Propositions and Self-Referential Musings. I haven’t seen many of Allen’s heavy dramas and, if the well admired “Crimes and Misdemeanors” is any indication, I don’t really want to. In that one, a contrived collection of tangentially related plotlines are eventually connected by a self-conscious, heavy-handed message about Life and Art. The point seems to be for us to marvel at how very, very serious Allen’s ideas are.
The question of Allen’s seriousness and its value is raised more interestingly by his latest, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” a short and thinly plotted comedy-drama about a couple of young women who take an “unexpectedly” passionate vacation in Barcelona. The film is accompanied by ostentatiously dry and rational narration (read with ridiculously crisp diction by Christopher Evan Welch), employed not for expository purposes, but, apparently, as an intentionally pretentious representation of Intellect, inserted as a contrast to the Passion of Vicky and Cristina’s sexy, sexy escapades. The dialogue is similarly self-conscious, with the characters strenuously marking themselves and each other with unwieldy adjectives (“impulsive,” “uptight,” “passionate,” etc.). Soon enough, however, it becomes clear that this pointedness is part of a peculiar and almost hypnotic style. As the characters frantically pursue archetypes of art, passion, stability and so on (signified by obvious metaphors and clunky dialogue), the film seems to be more and more keenly aware of the absurd banality of these Big Ideas.
This is, in a way, a subtle parody of the overwrought seriousness of a movie like “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” but at its best, it’s more than that. Scarlett Johansson is, in my estimation, a pretty limited actress, but her performance is pitch-perfect for this movie. She plays Cristina, the ostensibly impulsive and unattached artist type who rails against repressive social constructs. Johansson plays Cristina with a veneer of teasing sensuality, but there is an odd and telling emotional blankness in her performance. Although she and the narrator generally attribute her actions to turbulent passions and deep, artsy anxieties, her real motivation seems to be shallow vanity; she seems to enjoy rubbing stories of her sexual escapades in the face of Vicky’s uptight husband more than she enjoys the sex itself. Allen doesn’t morally condemn Cristina’s bohemian flailings. Instead, he portrays them as utterly shallow, which is more effective, and strangely poignant.
The film is shot in Barcelona, and a good deal of fuss is made about the exotic surroundings, but the depiction of Spanish culture is deliberately stereotypical, consisting primarily of romantic guitar music, colorful architecture and Javier Bardem’s voice. The film consciously takes a tourist’s point of view. The shallow, needy gaze of the American protagonists is reflected in the depiction of a culture that seems sexually open and inviting, yet, in the end, deeply foreign and untouchable. (Really, this is a projection of the movie’s attitude toward emotion in general.) Javier Bardem, as Juan Antonio, the passionate Spaniard who seduces the two women extremely easily, is given little to do except represent Enigmatic Spanishness and utter trite seize-the-day type aphorisms in a sexy accent. It’s thematically appropriate, but it doesn’t seem enough to keep Bardem’s powerful presence engaged.
That potential is realized much more effectively by the late introduction of Juan Antonio’s troubled (possibly psychotic) ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz). While Bardem fits smoothly into Allen’s conception of The Spanish Person As Cultural Other, Cruz enters the film with an intensity that makes her a true outsider to Allen’s deliberately shallow milieu, and threatens to throw the film out of balance. That she ends up fitting in better than Bardem is a credit to Allen’s clever conception: Cruz’s dark Spanish vixen actually turns out to be the rough equivalent of the emotionally vulnerable, neurotic femme-not-quite-fatales typical of Allen’s most iconic works. Her outbursts of passion are played increasingly for comedy, which in turn emphasizes the overheatedness of the Tempestuous Spaniards melodrama.
The film’s real standout performance, though, belongs to Rebecca Hall as Vicky, who, the narration informs us, is in love with stability, commitment and rationality. Yeah, right. It’s obvious from the first that Vicky’s emotional life will prove more interesting and rocky than Cristina’s, and Hall’s performance is far too dynamic to fit into the narrator’s easy classification. In fact, Hall may be too good for this movie to handle. Midway through, the movie’s emotional focus shifts somewhat gracelessly from Cristina’s love life to Vicky’s dilemma between her stable marriage to Doug (Chris Messina) and her feelings toward Juan Antonio that linger after a one-night stand. This should be an opportunity for Hall to shine, but Allen’s writing, as self-conscious as ever, keeps her trapped in an emotionally stunted world.
Oh yeah… so it’s true, this movie does involve a threesome with Bardem, Cruz, and Johansson. Woo hoo, etc. However, the film’s most paradoxically impressive feat may be that this scene is not (to me, at least) remotely arousing, despite its lurid trappings. The film’s view of sex and relationships is both coldly distant and embarrassingly close-up; it resides in a place where sensuality and rationality collide awkwardly. In the movie’s conclusion, as Vicky and Cristina leave Barcelona, apparently none the wiser, the film remains firmly rooted in the shallow, touristic perspective that colors Vicky and Cristina’s emotional world throughout the story. It’s hard to tell whether, in the end, Allen is simply condescending to Vicky and Cristina or expressing compassion for them. The ending is stubbornly mundane, but, if you look at it right, it’s sort of tragic. For better or for worse, it suits this weird little movie exactly.
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