MOVIE REVIEW: VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA

I heard so many wonderful accounts and reviews of this movie I was tempted to see it. Labor Day, when most everything else was closed, was a perfect time to spend an afternoon in the theatre. Mind you, I haven’t been to a movie in more than three years, so this was a special occasion for me, and putting down eight dollars was a sign of great expectations.

I was, I must tell you up front, disappointed. I think the movie is a failure. I should explain this judgment before I go on. The movie is billed as a “comedy” but there were very few laughs in the audience. I laughed a lot but mostly silently to myself for fear of shaking up the people around me. All the characters in the play were defective, dysfunctional in one way or another and constantly making self-destructive decisions. Instead of finding their mistakes funny, the audience was pulling for them, hoping they would redress themselves at the critical moments. The characters had sufficiently sympathetic personalities for the public to want to help them. Maybe the public could identify so well with the characters that they were not willing to let them suffer the indignities of ridicule. But doesn’t comedy depend on comedians making fools of themselves?

The two American girls, Vicky and Cristina, go to Spain for a short holiday. Though they have very different expectations of the trip, both fall for a Spanish Don Juan. The three principal figures plus the Spaniard’s ex-wife are all stereotypes. The girls are emotionally starved for a love experience that exists only in their imaginations and the Don Juan is a hustler, only interested in getting laid. He is fully aware of the girl’s weaknesses, and in short order conquers both of them. The girls are in love with the idea of the man they see as “romantic” for his frank physicality, and for his pseudo bohemianism. The man appears always in his frumpy clothes and with an unshaven stubble. His Spanish ex-wife-girl-friend is a hysterical type who can only express herself in bouts of declamatory rhetoric and threats of violence; a darkly disturbed person who provides the climatic scene with a revolver ready to do everybody in.

Woody Allen reveals his life long attraction/repulsion for psychological conditions which infect his characters and propel his plot lines. This movie is a repeat of the same old pre-occupations of the director-writer. We can concede that Mr. Allen is a brilliant cineaste but we can still wish he would finally grow up.

The parts I did appreciate in the movie were the interludes of guitar playing that enhanced moments of tension or that seduced us into tender feelings of affection. The shots of the architecture of Barcelona and other Spanish cities were great although too fleeting. Views of Gaudi’s architecture can be redeeming.

(9/2/08)