Woody Allen (2008)

It’s witty and well acted; it made me smile much of the time and laugh occasionally; it’s pleasing to watch the sunlit images and the beautiful people in the main parts.    Yet it’s still vaguely disappointing because it’s slight and indolent compared with the best of Woody Allen.  It’s also unfortunate – and hardly his fault – that you can feel most frustrated immediately after the best moments (and there are some really good ones) because they remind you what you’ve been missing the rest of the time.  At the start of the film, a voice-over summarises the personalities – in particular the philosophies of love – of Vicky and Cristina, two young American friends who are spending the summer in Barcelona.   This strikingly precise explanation of their characters is read in a smug tone (by Christopher Evan Welch); you rather expect to see it contradicted in what unfolds.   This isn’t at all what happens.  The narrator, who soon returns and recurs frequently throughout the film, is pointlessly omniscient – telling you what’s going to happen (and occasionally what you’re actually seeing).   The narration does nothing, except to make you aware that the plot is so skinny that Allen feels he needs this padding – and sometimes make you wish you were listening to an exchange between characters instead of the gist of such an exchange being reported through this rather tedious voice.

I don’t know what caused Woody Allen to relocate the setting of his films to Europe but his moving on from England to the continent is a relief here.   His last three films have been based in London; I’ve not yet seen Scoop or Cassandra’s Dream but it was a shock in Match Point to find that such a gifted writer had something of a tin ear for English locutions.  Vicky Cristina Barcelona works much better than Match Point for many reasons, but an important one is that it’s primarily about Americans abroad and how they do and don’t adapt to what they find there.  And the defined timeframe (July and August of one year) makes the girls’ Barcelona experience seem like a beguiling interruption of their lives in America.  This reworking of the young-American(s)-abroad theme is mildly charming – partly because it seems old-fashioned, partly because Allen can still get some minor comic mileage out of the juxtaposition of American affluence and American innocence.

Woody Allen is now 73.  It’s not clear from this film whether he has mellowed or is losing energy.  The visual serenity of the Spain on display here (shot by Javier Aguirresarobe), although it’s extremely agreeable, is also slightly dull in its travelogue quality, as if Allen is suggesting – or would like to believe – that it would be simply delightful to live in this sunny, luxurious locale and to devote yourself to the sensual pleasures that the artist Juan Antonio offers to Vicky and Cristina when he first propositions them:  ‘We’ll see beautiful sculptures … we’ll drink good wine … we’ll make love’.  The American men in this film are affable, suffocating philistines and, as such, contrasted with Juan Antonio, his poet father and his circle of friends – other artists and writers.  We’re told (by the narrator) about these friends but we see them only fleetingly and we never hear what they (apart from the father, in a couple of brief scenes) have to say.   In a New York setting, the tensions and pretensions of soi-disant artists would once have been as irresistible a target for Woody Allen as the small-minded materialism of the American men presented here.  (This isn’t a very rich source of comedy – except for a line delivered by a materialist wife, recommending her interior designer to Vicky as someone who’s ‘creative – but he knows when to back off’.)  Imagine how Juan Antonio’s father, who refuses to have his poems published because he hates life so much, would have been treated as a creature of Manhattan (something like the tyrannical artist husband played by Max von Sydow in Hannah and Her Sisters).  In Europe, however, the artistic preoccupations of Juan Antonio’s family and friends appear to be self-justifying.

Another element of the erosion of Woody Allen’s anxious edge seems to be a sentimentalising of the youth of today, and the sexual freedom they enjoy (in both senses of the word).  This can hardly be personal nostalgia:  we know that relationships were never a piece of cake for him, at any age.  Allen’s envious distance from the younger generation of characters doesn’t help the actresses playing Vicky and Cristina.  In the case of Scarlett Johansson, as Cristina, there’s the additional problem that she seems to be Allen’s current muse (she’s been in three of his last four films).  There’s been a tendency, even in his best work, for Allen to feel his muse is so absolutely fascinating that her role can be relatively underwritten (like Diane Keaton’s in Manhattan and Mia Farrow’s in Hannah and Her Sisters).   Cristina has come to Barcelona after making a 12-minute film which she doesn’t like.  When, late on in the story, she walks out on the ménage à trois with Juan Antonio and his ex-wife Maria Elena, the latter accuses her of ‘chronic dissatisfaction’ – but you don’t get a sense of this either from the rest of what Cristina’s given to say or do, or from Johansson’s presence.  She’s a good, nuanced actress but there’s an essential placidity about her – suggesting or creating serious tensions doesn’t come easily to her.  During the weekend that Vicky and Cristina spend with Juan Antonio, Cristina is taken ill and Juan Antonio and Vicky sleep together while she’s in her sick bed.  Flying back to Barcelona, Cristina gabbles apologetically to the other two, who are silent, for putting a damper on the weekend – in a monologue about food poisoning, you sense Scarlett Johansson’s pleasure in getting this brief opportunity to talk in proper Woody Allenese in a properly ironic Woody Allen situation.  Otherwise, Cristina seems to have a rather sunny, relaxedly game-for-anything disposition; it enables her to acclimatise more easily than the sexually more conventional Vicky, who is completing a master’s in ‘Catalan identity’ but is evidently a beginner in the subject.  This is a decent enough joke – but it’s a mark of Woody Allen’s increasing laziness as a writer that he doesn’t give the character opportunities to suggest she’s full of information but short of instinctive understanding about the culture.  He deprives Vicky of the detailed verbal facility that the actress in the role needs to play off against the girl’s emotional uncertainty.

Even so, Rebecca Hall gives a good performance.   In the early stages, she seems a little self-conscious (perhaps because she’s an English girl playing an American).  She talks as if trying to convince herself that she’s really a character in a Woody Allen film – and as if impersonating what she’s heard before is the best way of convincing herself.  But Hall quickly settles down and I liked her more and more.  Her height – she’s taller than both the actors with whom she’s romantically involved in the story  – probably helps her as a comedienne and she has the ability to look both beautiful and silly at the same time.  What really makes the film, however, are the characters of Juan Antonio and Maria Elena – in the way they’re conceived, written and performed.  Woody Allen may be dreamily idealising aspects of Mediterranean life in Vicky Cristina Barcelona but his comic instincts are still too sharp to pass up the opportunities that he perceives in this relationship.  The situation is set up for the arrival of Maria Elena; we’re told about her tempestuous, failed marriage to Juan Antonio, that she attacked him with a knife, that his father thought the world of her.  When a midnight phone call informs Juan Antonio that Maria Elena is in hospital after a failed suicide attempt, he brings her back to the home he’s now sharing with Cristina.  Penelope Cruz makes a spectacular entrance and, if nothing that follows has quite the same impact, it probably says a lot about the impact of her first appearance.  Cruz is very ready to use her looks satirically and she gives Maria Elena’s tirades a transporting, funny rhythm.

Javier Bardem, if last year’s acceptance speeches for his award-winning performance in No Country for Old Men are anything to go by, is far from fluent in English:  I was knocked out by the precision of his line readings (for example, when he describes Cristina as the missing ingredient in his life – ‘like salt’, which he makes sound wonderfully anti-climactic).  Until Maria Elena’s arrival, Bardem embodies the sensual wisdom and relaxation of the place that fascinates Vicky and Cristina – and, like Cruz, he uses his sexual magnetism for comic as well as romantic effect.  But it’s when Maria Elena appears on the scene that his performance really takes off.  With the woman he’s most passionate about but can’t live with, Juan Antonio is revealed to be as tense and emotionally snagged as most other substantial figures in the Woody Allen universe.  Allen has Bardem and Cruz go at each other verbally like two Manhattanites – but in Spanish (although Juan Antonio keeps scolding Maria Elena that she should speak English in the presence of Cristina).  Hearing Woody Allen lines in a foreign language, seeing them as subtitles, has a comic magic of its own – in addition to the expert, high-voltage sparring of the actors.   Allen ignites the film once he has the Spanish characters behave not like an exotic race apart but like the people we know from his New York comedies.  There’s a great bit when Juan Antonio and Maria Elena argue in the street:  it seems just the sort of thing that North European and American viewers might expect hot-blooded Latins to do on screen, except that they’re not insulting each other using the stereotyped vocabulary of sexual jealousy:  they’re shouting things like, ‘I’ll always be frustrated with you until you realise your potential’.  The delivery is magnificently, gutturally Hispanic, the words might be those of American Jews or Gentiles in Central Park and therapy.   Both Bardem and Cruz are terrific too in the brief shots of them at work as artists – in which their emotional engagement with the art they’re making is both convincing and, in its intensity, comical.

With some of the minor roles too, Woody Allen’s instincts and skill with the actors – and the fact that you sense that they’re enjoying themselves and working with him – save the day.  Patricia Clarkson, as Vicky’s relative Judy, with whom the two girls have come to stay in Barcelona, seems to have nothing to do until Allen turns her into an unhappy wife who urges Vicky not to repeat her own error of staying loyal to a husband she doesn’t love.  Vicky’s fiancé Doug comes over to Barcelona to marry her (making clear they’ll do the social event properly when they’re back in America);  the role looks a largely thankless one on paper but Chris Messina does a sympathetic and skilful job – you can see what’s decent and appealing, as well as what’s profoundly boring, about Doug. (And Messina gets his reward in the closing stages, with one of the best lines in the film.)   Elsewhere, Allen seems to have an idea for a character and then drop it, unsure how to take it forward:  Juan Antonio’s father and a young American whom Vicky meets at language class (and who actually seems much more boring than Doug) come into this category.  The film seems extended even at 96 minutes but it’s successful enough to make you realise that, by now, Allen needs only to make a half-way decent movie to be able to draw on the colossal audience goodwill that he’s accumulated over the last forty years.  Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the first product of the ‘late Woody Allen’ era (an insensitive phrase to use about the work of a man as death-obsessed as he’s always been) to do this.

13 February 2009