Woody Allen’s 39th film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a gentle romantic farce that follows two young women as they travel to Barcelona and explore what love means to them. Vicky is an engaged and sensible-minded grad student studying Catalan identity, played by Rebecca Hall. Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) is an impulsive romantic who knows only what she doesn’t want from love – namely everything Vicky does: security, commitment and monogamy. While Barcelona is a city, which, if the film is anything to go by, is constantly bathed in honeyed light as if from the pages of a travel brochure.
Dining at a restaurant, a rugged stranger – a painter (Javier Bardem) – propositions the pair for a weekend of sightseeing and sex in Oviedo. He is smooth and sincere. Cities and individuals are a site for escapism and fiction just as much as films and books, the film tells us. Cristina likes the way Europeans think – or rather, feel – and is instantly on board. Vicky’s Spanish fantasy lies in Gaudi’s architecture and she remains incredulous to the approach but decides to look after Cristina.
Uncomplicated and literal-minded symbols though they are, Allen, never the moralist, plays with the contrasting types: the brunette and the blonde. Cristina falls first, but a little of her free-spiritedness rubs off on Vicky. ‘Life is short and with no purpose,’ Juan tells us. It’s the existential shrug present in most Allen movies, but in Bardem’s mouth it’s an invitation for hedonistic bliss that eventually breaks Vicky and, with Cristina fortunately bedridden, they kiss. In slow-motion.
Vicky backs off when her husband flies out from New York for a flash wedding, but is rueful as Cristina bites at a second chance with Juan. At this point the movie takes on the qualities of Mills and Boon; our protagonists are more than comfortably bourgeois and the whole trip has the feel of a grand tour rather than a short trans-Atlantic break. Fancy flamenco guitar accompanies every other scene and the narrator, far from the Allen archetype, is busier filling in expository details than providing ironic contrasts. Is the sun-dappled romance being endorsed? Does the film think anything at all? For a while it just looks sexy, and when Vicky drops clunkers like ‘why is your father so angry toward the human race’ in casual conversion, you guess Allen’s distracted, too.
Relief arrives in the form of Juan’s jealous ex-wife (Penelope Cruz), who soon muddies the water. The side of real European feeling Cristina doesn’t account for in lieu of scenic bike rides and open relationships; her tirades in subtitled Spanish provide an ironic counterpoint much like a more famous use of subtitles in Annie Hall. Cristina stands bemused, smiling, taken by the surface quality of the words but unaware she’s being insulted; romance meets reality.
The farce rolls on and by the closing shot Cristina is nursing hurt feelings, Vicky a bandaged hand and her husband, Doug, is looking forward none the wiser. The pair is back where they started. Except they’re a little older, and not necessarily any wiser. It’s a well-worn type of ending for Allen but here the journey is slighter and the message now well familiar. Life is a state of constant dissatisfaction, of always wanting to be somewhere or someone else. Art can help, but that’s all.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona offers that disposable escapism and fits neatly between Match Point and Midnight in Paris. If Allen had an ‘early, funny’ period, followed by a ‘serious’ one, the films of his 70s might be regarded as his ‘late, subtle’ or ‘late, unambitious’ period. Whatever the case, unambitious is a lot better than bad.
