Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

I'm embarrassingly unfamiliar with most of Woody Allen's work, but I have seen Match Point, and while watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona I was once again struck by Allen's interest in the rhythms of polite conversation. The dialogue in Hollywood films tends to be a juggling act, an attempt to imitate normal speech while moving the plot forward and sounding sufficiently witty. Allen's manipulations are much subtler: he actually lets his characters have conversations with each other.

Yes, these conversations move the plot forward, but they're realistic and intelligent; you develop the sense that these people actually have lives beyond what we see.

And while Allen makes everyday conversation uncommonly interesting, the characters themselves present a similar contradiction: they're types we've seen before but nonetheless grow to care about as unique individuals.

Vicky and Cristina are played by Rebecca Hall (Christian Bale's wife in The Prestige) and Scarlett Johansson, respectively. They're longtime best friends who decide to spend the summer in Barcelona with Vicky's relatives Judy (Patricia Clarkson) and Mark (Kevin Dunn).

Eating dinner one night, a man in a red shirt comes up to Vicky and Cristina's table. This is Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), a painter who they first noticed at an art show that afternoon. He offers to fly them overnight to another city, sightsee for the weekend, and make love. "With who?" Vicky asks. "Hopefully, the three of us," he responds.

If a guy tried that in real life, he would be a creep and would be ignored. Vicky realizes this and tells him to leave. Cristina, however, thinks he's good-looking, polite, and confident -- also, apparently she wants the movie to be more than twelve minutes long. Vicky is still annoyed: you take us away for the weekend and expect us to sleep with you in return? "I would prefer not to barter about it," he says. Soon the three of them are on a plane together.

I'm often annoyed when the movies present practicality as a negative trait, and for a while I was worried that the movie would make Vicky learn the evils of her realist ways and fall madly in love with Juan Antonio (over the guy she's engaged to back home -- who has a steady job and thus is a bore). It doesn't exactly happen like that; I appreciated especially that the movie doesn't take sides between the ideals of Vicky and the moony Cristina. Actually, through the use of a third person narrator (Christopher Evan Welch), it very gently mocks both of them at points.

The film gets a welcome shot in the arm about halfway through with the arrival of Juan Antonio's ex-wife, the slightly nuts Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz). They love each other, truly, but can't stand each other; the added elements of Vicky and Cristina bring a new dynamic to the relationship that wasn't there their first time around.

Allen doesn't really break any ...