9
Play it Again, Woody
Self-Reflexive Critique in Contemporary Woody Allen Films
It is impossible to perceive Allen’s films adequately without paying substantial attention to those movies’ pervasive skepticism toward the very art of which they are a product.
(Peter Bailey 2001)
According to many critics, Woody Allen’s recent films do nothing his earlier works have not already done. Scott Tobias’s reviews of Allen’s latest works exemplify this perspective. Tobias (2008) writes of Cassandra’s Dream (2008), “Like so many late-period Allens, it leaves behind the feeling that he’s made this movie before, but better.” Tobias (2010) similarly opines that You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) “recycles character types from his previous work without inventing new reasons to summon them into existence.” Tobias (2008) laments, “Allen seemed to expend his last burst of creative energy on 1992’s Husbands and Wives.” This chapter contends, on the contrary, that Allen’s most recent films should not be dismissed as inferior imitations of his prior work. Rather, such films as Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger can be read as self-reflexive meditations on Allen’s cinematic oeuvre itself. Through both narrative and stylistic choices, these films call attention to Allen’s characteristic tropes and iconography in order to critique the normative influence of Hollywood conventions and Allen’s complicity in their perpetuation.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona chronicles the adventures of two friends, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), living in Barcelona for the summer. Engaged to marry a sensible, successful man, Vicky has come to Barcelona to pursue research for her master’s thesis in Catalan identity. Cristina, who fancies herself an artist, seeks romance and erotic pleasure outside of the traditional relational paradigms of marriage and monogamy. Vicky and Cristina meet Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), a brooding yet quixotic artist with whom they both have sexual affairs. Midway through the film, Vicky and Cristina also meet Juan Antonio’s ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz), who is a tempestuous artist with a history of violence toward herself and others, especially Juan Antonio. Despite her tryst with Juan Antonio and her increasing doubts about marriage, Vicky marries her fiancé Doug (Chris Messina) who has joined her in Barcelona. Cristina develops a serious relationship with Juan Antonio, which evolves to include Maria Elena as well, before she tires of the arrangement and decides to move on to something new. The film ends with Vicky and Cristina leaving Barcelona, headed toward uncertain futures, both women unsure of the choices they have made regarding life and love.
The narrative of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (hereafter Stranger) focuses on the troubled relationships faced by the various members of one family. Alfie Shepridge (Anthony Hopkins) has recently left his wife Helena (Gemma Jones) after 40 years of marriage and married a much younger woman (and former prostitute) named Charmaine (Lucy Punch). Helena crumbles in the wake of her divorce and turns for support to alcohol and the guidance of an ersatz fortune teller named Cristal (Pauline Collins). Alfie and Helena’s daughter, Sally (Naomi Watts), longs for a child and struggles in her unhappy marriage to Roy (Josh Brolin), a once successful novelist who cannot seem to finish his second novel. Sally develops unrequited affection for her boss and tries unsuccessfully to open her own art gallery, while Roy begins an affair with a younger neighbor named Dia (Freida Pinto). As Alfie and Charmaine’s relationship wears thin and Alfie longs to return to his former marriage, Helena develops a fascination with her past lives and pursues a relationship with Jonathan (Roger Ashton-Griffiths), a fellow spiritualist desperate to reconnect with his dead wife, Claire. Roy leaves Sally for Dia and steals the novel of a friend, whom he wrongly believes to be dead, in order to misrepresent it as his own book.1 The film ends with Helena and Jonathan discussing reincarnation and deciding to commit to one another, having received permission from Jonathan’s deceased wife.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger are, in some ways, consonant with much of Allen’s earlier work, especially given their thematic interest in, as Foster Hirsch (1981) might put it, “love, sex, death, and the meaning of life.” These films also illustrate Allen’s characteristic emphasis on characters struggling with their identities and with their life’s work as artists. Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger, however, also mark a significant departure from Allen’s prior body of work primarily because they do not take place in the director’s beloved New York City but are part of a series of films shot and set in the United Kingdom and continental Europe. Beginning with Match Point (2005), which Allen filmed in London, this series of films includes Scoop (2006) and Cassandra’s Dream, which were also shot in London, and Midnight in Paris (2011), which was shot on location in Paris. This pattern will presumably continue, as Allen began shooting The Bop Decameron in Rome shortly after the release of Midnight in Paris.
Proving significantly more successful than Stranger, Vicky Cristina Barcelona won a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture in the musical or comedy genre, Cruz won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Maria Elena, and the film earned over $96 million in worldwide box office receipts. Stranger received no major award nominations and earned less than $35 million.2 Despite its success at awards ceremonies and global box offices, Vicky Cristina Barcelona nonetheless received mixed reviews. While Mick LaSalle (2008) describes Vicky Cristina Barcelona as the work of a “confident and mature artist,” both Lawrence Toppman (2008) and J.R. Jones (2008) call the film “lazy.” Andrew O’Hehir, writing for Salon (2008), asserts, “His new comedy ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’ . . . has been widely acclaimed as one of his best in recent years, which is true but is also mighty faint praise. It’s literally difficult to believe that the person who made this picturesque, clueless, oddly misanthropic picture also made ‘Annie Hall’ and ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors.’ ”
Stranger fared even worse with most critics. Jones (2010) sardonically writes, “The paltry theme is that we can’t predict the future, but I spent part of the time calculating how many more feeble movies Allen will make, based on his productivity rate (one per year), his batting average (four duds for every success), his current age (74), and his father’s longevity (Martin Konigsberg lived to be 100). Are you ready for 20 more remakes of Manhattan?” Roger Moore (2010) offers an equally strong critique, characterizing Stranger as “A mirthless, joyless comedy with nary a hint of romance, mystery or justification for its existence, it joins ‘Hollywood Ending,’ ‘Anything Else,’ ‘Whatever Works,’ ‘Cassandra’s Dream’ and other recent clunky, tone-deaf Allen films that plainly should have remained weak, undeveloped ideas tucked inside [Allen’s] infamous desk.”
Without trying to assess whether Allen’s recent films do or do not live up to the legacy of their cinematic predecessors, this chapter argues that neither Vicky Cristina Barcelona nor Stranger is “clueless” or “undeveloped” as a text. Rather, the very devices about which many critics complain, including the use of recycled character types and voiceover narration, function rhetorically within Allen’s films; they may lessen certain viewers’ enjoyment of the films, but they also make critical arguments about the pleasures and perils of film spectatorship. In fact, Moore’s complaint that Stranger offers no “justification for its existence” points, rather inadvertently, to what is useful and challenging about these films: they interrogate the worth of the cinema as an industry, art form, and aspect of everyday living, asking each imagined spectator to consider the personal, social, and cultural costs of a life spent at the movies. Like Hollywood Ending (2002), which satirizes the film industry and Hollywood’s rigid narrative conventions, these films operate as self-referential musings on Allen’s own body of work and as critical considerations of Hollywood as an industry where Allen remains both a canonical presence and something of an outsider.
Evidence that we can interpret Allen’s choices in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger as strategic and self-conscious meditations on the cinema mounts when we consider these offerings alongside other films, for as Peter Bailey reminds us, “teasing artistic self-referentiality [is] never completely absent from Allen’s films” (2001: 3) and “there is little uncalculated about the making of his films” (15). Consider, for example, Allen’s recent work, Midnight in Paris, which David Edelstein (2011) calls a “sly act of self-criticism” given its attention to themes of nostalgia and repetition, especially in relation to art, film, and literature. Midnight in Paris depicts Gil as a successful Hollywood screenwriter struggling to write his first novel. While on vacation in Paris, Gil finds himself magically transported to the 1920s each night at midnight, where he encounters what he imagines to be an ideal artistic past populated by his literary and artistic heroes, including F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Luis Buñuel, and Salvador Dali. The film directly confronts questions about the merits of filmmaking as an art form, as Gil finds his work as a screenwriter to be less gratifying than that of writing a novel. When he feels himself falling short compared to past literary greats, he considers abandoning his dream of writing books to return to the more commercial work of writing Hollywood scripts.
We also find evidence for reading Allen’s recent films as self-conscious critiques of the filmmaking process by looking back to his earlier works. Ralph Tutt, for example, calls Stardust Memories (1980) “an energetic depiction of what Christian Metz calls the ‘cinema machine’ and a clear indication of Allen’s growing preoccupation with the possibility of film aesthetics vis-à-vis the film industry as a subject for filmmaking” (1991: 105). Daniel Green identifies a similar strategy in Allen’s Interiors, quoting Ron Librach’s description of Interiors (1978) as a “parody of itself” that uses overwrought mise-en-scène deliberately to “reveal the fallacies on which it is based” (Librach qtd. in Green 1991: 72). As a result, Green concludes, “The film cannibalizes itself” (72), making the very structures of its composition the subject of its central joke.
Green reads the self-reflexivity in Allen’s films as evidence of the director’s anxious belief that “ ‘serious’ themes such as sex, death, or identity are made problematic by the artificial nature of all cinema” (1991: 75). Citing the hypermediated Zelig (1983) and Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Green argues that Allen negotiates this conundrum by attempting to “expose the artifice [of the cinema] deliberately, to explore the interplay of signifier and signified in the communication of meaning” (75). This assertion mirrors Bailey’s contention that “each Woody Allen film from Play it Again, Sam onward constitutes the director’s highly self-conscious reconfiguring of the relationship between the chaos of experience and the stabilizing, controlling capacities of aesthetic rendering” (Bailey 2001: 5). While Green, writing in 1991, concludes that Allen’s “subsequent films have not built on the promise fulfilled” by Zelig and Purple Rose of Cairo (75), I argue that later Allen works do return analytically to the subjects of filmmaking and film spectatorship, although more obliquely. Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger lack the overt and sustained attention to film as an art, an industry, and an experience, but the texts deploy their own cinematic structures in critical and reflexive ways, as if to say, “You will see a film you have seen before – but for good reason.”
Thomas Schatz argues of Hollywood cinema that while “the medium’s technological evolution has enhanced its capacity for representation, its narrative and thematic evolution has been toward codification, convention, and artifice” (1982: 180). Allen confronts this tension head on in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger by using both narrative and stylistic devices that call attention to not only their artificiality but also their staleness. Similarly to Annie Hall, as read by Schatz, Vicky Christina Barcelona and Stranger “foreground the process of narrativity” (Schatz 1982: 183), interrogate the mechanics of the cinema, and catechize the belief structures that underpin and are underpinned by Hollywood style and form. Given that the film spectator necessarily “negotiates the story in terms of his previous experience of the form itself” (Schatz 1982: 180), Allen compels the imagined audiences of these films to think about how they and the myriad films from which they borrow have shaped not only Hollywood’s standard operating procedures but also the ways in which Hollywood spectators come to narrate their own life stories.
After making Hollywood Ending in 2002, Allen described his relationship with Hollywood not as “love-hate” but as “love-contempt.” He explained,
I’ve never had to suffer any of the indignities that one associates with the studio system. I’ve always been independent in New York by sheer good luck. But I have an affection for Hollywood because I’ve had so much pleasure from films that have come out of there. Not a whole lot of them, but a certain amount of them have been very meaningful to me (Weiss 2002).
As such, Allen’s films characteristically allude to and diverge from Hollywood’s filmmaking culture. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger, Allen invites his spectators not to reflect on his body of work as an insular or discrete oeuvre but to consider his films as they relate to the Hollywood norms and conventions that influence and are influenced by Allen as a filmmaker. Though neither film references Hollywood or filmmaking directly, each film bears traces of familiar Hollywood tropes and storylines that invite viewers to interpret these films in relationship to the culture of Hollywood cinema. In order to explore how Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger operate reflexively and critically, this chapter examines three strategies at work within these films: the reliance on recycled or clichéd character types, the use of voiceover narration, and the thematic and formal emphasis on nostalgia and repetition.
Critics have accused both Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger of trafficking in hackneyed and predictable character types. Toppman (2008) writes of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, “All four main characters are stereotypes that deviate scarcely an inch from their templates.” Jones’s 2008 review for the Chicago Reader also censures Allen for “falling back on ethnic stereotypes ([by casting Latino actors] Bardem and Penélope Cruz as tempestuous lovers).” Carol Allen (2011) similarly describes the settings and characters of Stranger as borrowed from other times and generic contexts. While she describes the mise-en-scène of Sally and Roy’s flat as having a “distinctly odd ‘survival from the seventies’ look about it,” she contends that Cristal, the fortune teller, “is written like one of those pseudo working class charwomen from a thirties or forties film.” She further critiques Charmaine, the former prostitute, as a “caricature” who is “so over the top that she seems like a refugee from the Catherine Tate Show or Little Britain.” Echoing Carol Allen’s sentiments, LaSalle’s review for the San Francisco Chronicle (2010) describes the characters in Stranger as feeling “recycled,” while Wesley Morris (2010) reviews the film in the Boston Globe as “shopworn to the bone.”3
These critics are not wrong. Both Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger do exploit well-worn, if not threadbare, character types, but these stereotypes are not accidents or oversights. They are metatropes that operate critically within these films. From the outset, these films’ titles alert us to and invite us to think analytically about the clichés that will follow. For instance, consider the title Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which offers a laundry list of the film’s main characters and setting. It is neither descriptive nor alluring; it is, instead, a straightforward and dry inventory, reducing the complex people and places of this narrative to a series of objects in a catalog. The title, therefore, signals the ways in which the film will knowingly deploy similar reifications of various identity formations.
The fact that the structure and content of the title Vicky Cristina Barcelona – matter-of-factly listing names of principal characters – recalls the titles of earlier Allen films, including Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), also gestures toward this film’s insinuation that repetition is an inevitable part of human experience and that true originality is impossible. Perhaps even more telling in this regard is the title You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. This well-known and oft-repeated phrase represents an outmoded romantic cliché associated with fortune tellers, on whom the film casts considerable suspicion. The title heralds the film’s self-conscious and tongue-in-cheek attitude toward its characters and subject matter and, even more importantly, toward its own status as an original work of art. This phrase is one that presumably most audience members have heard before; it is also a phrase in which most viewers likely have little faith. From the outset, then, Stranger invites its imagined spectators to remain critical, if not skeptical, about what they see on screen; and, given the proclivity of Hollywood cinema toward the perpetuation of such romantic clichés, Stranger also induces viewers to take note of Hollywood’s limited capacity, or at least tendency, to offer audiences anything truly new or unexpected.
Other clichés implicitly structure the narratives of these films. Although the colloquial phrase never gets spoken in either film, both Stranger and Vicky Cristina Barcelona play on their imagined audiences’ familiarity with the clichéd assertion that “the grass is always greener on the other side.” Stranger depicts Roy as he develops an obsession with Dia, an exotic woman living in an apartment across a courtyard from the home he shares with Sally. He watches her play music, undress, and have sex with her fiancé, enthralled by the mystery and novelty she represents. As if to underscore the clichéd nature of the relationship that unfolds, Dia appears exclusively (and noticeably) in the color red. Just as the narrator calls her a “creature in red,” the film makes a number of intertextual allusions to popular songs and films that link Dia to the “lady in red” (or, the “woman in red”). This costuming choice casts Dia as less a fully fleshed out subject than a caricature and hence illustrates what Green might describe as the film’s tendency to parody, or cannibalize, itself (1991: 72).4
Once Roy moves in with Dia, however, he finds himself gazing at Sally, his estranged wife. Sitting in his new apartment on the other side of the courtyard, Roy watches Sally as she undresses, feeling stirrings of longing for the woman to whom he was once married. This pattern echoes the experiences of Alfie in Stranger, who tries unsuccessfully to reunite with Helena after their divorce, as well as the many lovers in Vicky Cristina Barcelona who consistently long for what they do not (or no longer) have. As if to literalize the “grass-is-greener” cliché, many of the couples in these films embark on their new commitments while sitting in idyllic fields of grass (for example, Dia and Roy and Helena and Jonathan on park benches in Stranger and Cristina, Juan Antonio, Cristina, and Maria Elena in a meadow in Vicky Cristina Barcelona).
Compounding the use of clichés in the Roy–Sally–Dia love triangle is Stranger’s conspicuous allusion to another film text, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Now famous as a film that critiques the voyeuristic modes of spectatorship the cinema encourages, Rear Window depicts L.B. Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart) as a man fascinated by the lives of others whom he glimpses through his apartment window. A photographer by trade, Jeffries has been immobilized by a broken leg and confined to a wheelchair in his apartment. He passes the days staring across his courtyard into the homes of his neighbors, voyeuristically fixating on the life stories he imagines as unfolding. In Stranger, Roy finds himself similarly entranced by what he sees in a window across the way. Although he is not literally immobilized, as is Jeffries, Roy does feel figuratively trapped. As indicated in voice over narration, “The thought of writing a new book paralyzed him.” Through this intertextual allusion, Stranger further implicates Hollywood movies and spectators in the perpetuation of reductive clichés used to describe human relationships.
This allusion makes it clear that Allen is not being entirely self-referential but is, instead, considering his films as part of a larger cultural formation: Hollywood cinema. Although his films operate somewhat outside Hollywood norms and sometimes break with its hegemonic conventions, Allen reminds viewers that no film, no matter what its stylistic modality or context, remains entirely unaffected by Hollywood’s influence. Even those films that consciously reject or combat Hollywood standards exist in relationship to its hegemonic standards. Making films in New York never fully insulated Allen from Hollywood’s pervasive impact and neither can removing himself to continental Europe or the United Kingdom. Further, this intertextual allusion addresses the constitutive role that Hollywood plays in the lives of spectators, for lived experience always remains mediated and never operates outside the influence of public culture and its artifacts, including (or especially) popular films.
Intertextual acts of recycling also connect Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger directly to one another, translating lines of dialogue from one film’s lothario to the next. When Juan Antonio first sees Vicky and Cristina eating dinner in Barcelona, he woos the younger women, inviting them to spend the weekend in Oviedo, the town in which he was born. When Vicky skeptically asks what this weekend will include, Juan Antonio replies, “I’ll show you around the city. We’ll eat well. We’ll drink good wine. We’ll make love.” Similarly, in Stranger, Roy works earnestly to seduce the young Dia away from her fiancé. After visiting Dia’s family home, Roy woos his would-be lover, regaling her with his vision of their life together with her as his “forever muse.” He promises, “I write. We open wine bottles. We make love.” Not incidentally, Roy’s enticement mirrors Juan Antonio’s language, replicating his words almost-but-not-quite exactly. While Juan Antonio’s words might sound alluring and seductive, Roy’s sound awkward and clumsy, as if he is barking orders instead of proffering an invitation.
Roy’s inferior imitation of Juan Antonio underscores the extent to which Hollywood films encourage mimetic reactions in spectators, who frequently use the narratives and iconography of popular cinema as what Kenneth Burke calls “equipment for living,” or cultural tools that offer strategies and attitudes for managing the experiences of everyday life (Burke 1937: 296–297). That is, spectators deploy mediated texts, such as films, as sense-making tools for translating and organizing the events of their lives. Despite the considerable influence Hollywood films may have on the identity formations and lived experiences of spectators, Allen’s cinematic caricatures and stereotypes remind us how limited and limiting Hollywood’s constructions of identity can be. So, while critic Kirk Honeycutt (2010) regretfully describes Allen’s recent characters as so redundant and unsurprising that viewers can “all but predict lines and attitudes before a scene begins,” I understand this banality and staleness not as a textual flaw but as exactly Allen’s point.
Similar to his use of recycled character types, Allen’s treatment of narrative in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger also critiques Hollywood’s complicity in perpetuating reductive assumptions about identity. Critics have called the narratives of both films “lazy” (Jones 2008, 2010) and “mechanical” (Groen 2010), disparaging as well their tendency toward loose ends and unresolved conclusions that leave “characters in the lurch” (Wilson 2010). But, as LaSalle (2010) argues, the supposed defects in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger’s character development and narrative structure might better be understood as strategic commentary on the film’s part. LaSalle (2010) ponders, “To make a movie about the essential futility of existence – to make it in earnest, not to play in the margins – isn’t it necessary to create a movie that is, in itself, pointless?” Rick Groen, writing for The Globe and Mail (2010), agrees with LaSalle’s assessment and interprets Stranger’s lack of resolution as “deliberate,” contending, “pointlessness is precisely the point here.” In other words, both LaSalle and Groen read Allen as echoing Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that the medium is the message. As Schatz explains it, this strategy privileges “a concern for the how over the what,” foregrounding the “realization that in certain texts the how actually is the what, that the mediation is the meaning” (1982: 182).
At stake in such refusal of tidy Hollywood resolutions is Allen’s critique of the illusions and false promises offered by impossibly happy endings. Calvin Wilson, reviewing Stranger for St. Louis Today (2010), interprets Allen’s loose endings as declaring, “Neat Hollywood endings are as phony and dangerous as Cristal’s ramblings.” As C. Morris argues of Allen’s longstanding tendency toward “ambiguous minor key endings,” these unresolved narratives and unfinished conclusions “parody the concept of reconciliation itself” (1987: 176). Such endings, therefore, not only challenge the hegemony of classical Hollywood storytelling conventions; they also critique the ideological assumptions that undergird such narrative form, allowing Allen’s films to refuse “American myths of ‘normalcy,’ assimilation, and integration” (Morris 1987: 176). Just as Roy cannot live up to Juan Antonio’s legend, Allen’s endings remind us that lived experience cannot live up to the normative expectations promulgated by Hollywood stories. People are not, in fact, templates with predictable life trajectories; life’s quandaries are almost never neatly resolved. By commingling recycled characters, intertextual allusions, and unresolved narratives, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger encourage spectators to be mindful of the impossibility of Hollywood’s fantasy structures.
Just as Allen’s unresolved endings underscore the arbitrariness of Hollywood’s promises of harmony, order, and meaning in everyday life, his films often use music and sound to make similar points. Morris argues that Allen’s soundtracks “use music ironically both to undercut such expectations and to provide artistic instances of the integrity and concord unavailable in life” (1987: 178). In some cases, for instance, music does not match the mood of the onscreen images; in other cases, music seems historically or culturally out of place in relation to the film’s setting. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger, Allen expands beyond ironic reliance on music and deploys voiceover narration to offer what Burke calls “perspective by incongruity,” a strategy that lends insight into an idea or experience by “wrench[ing] it loose” from its usual context or “ ‘constitutional’ setting” (1937: 309).
Actor Christopher Evan Welch narrates Vicky Cristina Barcelona; actor Zak Orth, who also played a minor role in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, provides the voiceover narration for Stranger. In both films, the actors deliver the narration with formal but pleasant tones and relatively unvarying inflection. Most critics did not respond favorably to these uses of narrators. Jones (2008) critiques Welch as “a bookish omniscient narrator . . . whose drily amused summations of the characters sound like Allen when he’s trying to write a funny New Yorker piece.” Reviewers have interpreted Orth’s narration in Stranger in varying, sometimes contradictory, ways but almost always in a negative light. LaSalle (2010) calls it a “crutch” that contributes to the film’s “logy demeanor” and Morris (2010) says it sounds as if it were “recorded in bathtub.” Michael O’Sullivan (2010) also calls the voiceover narration “incongruously chirpy,” suggesting that the tone of wry amusement that characterizes Orth’s narration does not fit with the film’s emphasis on loss and futility.
Critics also emphasize the ways in which the narration does not propel the narrative but instead acts as an unnecessary distraction. Regarding Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Toppman (2008) pronounces, “[Allen] uses a monotonous narrator to tell us what the characters think and do, though he then shows them performing the actions that have just been described.” Lumenick similarly describes the “wall-to-wall narration” as “redundant,” and Christopher Orr (2008) sardonically describes Welch as “heroically committed to ensuring that even the most inattentive viewer won’t miss a thing.” As a result, Orr concludes, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the cinematic equivalent of a book on tape: a movie that watches itself for you and tells you what it sees.”
Once again, these critics are right – to a point. The narration does often feel out of synch with the images and action onscreen, but it does so in order to offer critical commentary about the film narrative, characters, and fantasy structures. To demonstrate, Welch’s pedantic tone conflicts with the spontaneity that characterizes the diegesis and the naturalistic style of the actors in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The rather monotone narration also seems incompatible with the romantic fantasies that lead Vicky and Cristina on their adventures throughout Barcelona. While the women seek wild and transformative experiences, the narration flattens out their erotic impulses, foreshadowing the unsatisfying ends they will reach and the banality of their seemingly exotic exploits. The film’s opening scene evinces this tension as the narrator introduces the best friends and explains their pursuits in Barcelona and their differing “viewpoints” on love. While he describes the women’s passions and inner conflicts (he describes Vicky as having “no tolerance for pain and no lust for combat” but casts Cristina as “having accepted suffering as an inevitable part of deep passion”), Welch’s voice remains unaffected, even disinterested, as if he is already unconvinced about the significance of these women’s beliefs or upcoming adventures.
The film’s attempts to satirize the women’s romantic fantasies as clichéd and naive get redoubled later when Cristina attempts to sleep with Juan Antonio for the first time. In his hotel room, she describes herself as wanting “something more” than what traditional relationships offer, which she refers to as a “counterintuitive love.” Just as their encounter becomes amorous, however, Cristina becomes ill and has to flee urgently to the bathroom to vomit. She will spend the next several days in bed, her stomach ulcer having been exacerbated by her indulgent eating and drinking in Barcelona. This (literally anticlimactic) scene pokes fun at Hollywood’s treatments of romance and sex and reminds viewers of the prosaic and sometimes unpleasant aspects of everyday living, in the same way that the plodding narration reminds viewers of the hackneyed nature of the diegetic world they are encountering.
The tone of the narration in Stranger also seems to be strategically at odds with itself and with the rest of the film, vacillating between staid, formal speech and colloquial natter. The film opens with Orth’s voiceover narration paraphrasing Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He explains, “Shakespeare said, ‘Life was full of sound and fury and, in the end, signified nothing.’ ” This formal speech immediately gives way to more colloquial language as Orth narrates Helena’s experiences in chatty, even gossipy, tones. He says, “Okay, let’s begin with Helena.” This admixture of high-toned literary reference and more lowbrow idiomatic speech gets redoubled within the diegesis. To demonstrate, in a flashback to Sally and Roy’s early romance, after Orth has already explained that their marriage is falling apart, Roy recites William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow” to Sally. After quoting the poem in its entirety (“so much depends upon/ a red barrow/ glazed with rain water/ beside the white chickens”), Roy adds the phrase “and Sally’s ass.” This recourse to colloquial speech and casual tone recurs throughout the film, even as the content of Orth’s narration emphasizes the characters’ very serious experiences of loss and sorrow. For instance, Orth describes the dissolution of Alfie and Helena’s decades-long marriage by remarking rather blithely, “Alfie dumped her,” and he casually characterizes Alfie as being taken advantage of by his young bride “every time she screws him.” Stranger’s refusal of a coherent or consistent narrational frame highlights the arbitrariness of human experiences and signifies the futility of human attempts to make sense of life as if it were a narrative. Its tonal inconsistencies enact the vicissitudes that characterize everyday living and counters Hollywood’s insistence on orderly, tidy storytelling.
Additionally, the narration in both films does frequently feel redundant and unnecessary. In one of the opening scenes of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, we see Vicky and Cristina eating lunch on a terrace with Vicky’s aunt, Judy, and uncle, Mark, in their Barcelona home. The camera follows a household employee as she walks on to the terrace carrying a tray of food to a table where Vicky, Cristina, Judy, and Mark are already seated and eating. The voiceover explains, “After the girls unpacked and Judy’s husband Mark got home from the golf course, lunch was served on the terrace.” This narration does nothing to advance the plot, offers gratuitous details (as in the fact that the “girls unpacked”), and provides almost no expository information (outside of naming Judy’s husband and his pastime), which could not be gleaned from the visuals in the scene.
In a later instance, voiceover narration explains that, while traveling with Vicky and Cristina, an intoxicated Juan Antonio broached the subject of sex with the two women. Most films would either depict this line of action (without any voiceover narration) or use voiceover narration in the stead of onscreen depictions of the event, allowing the narrative to move forward efficiently. Vicky Cristina Barcelona, however, represents this information doubly. Immediately after the voiceover ends, the scene depicts Juan Antonio, with drink in hand at a bar, as he asks Vicky and Cristina if either woman might like to sleep with him. Similar redundancy characterizes much of the narration in Stranger. A montage sequence depicts Alfie’s post-divorce transformation, including the acquisition of a new sports car, a new wardrobe, and a physical makeover. As shots depict Alfie receiving a spray-on tan, the narrator explains, “After his divorce, Alfie had his teeth whitened and his skin darkened.” Once again, the voiceovers provide spectators with no insight or information not made visually available, and in these examples and several other similar moments throughout both films, the redundancy of the verbal cues and onscreen action is so acute that it feels analogous to the effects of overlapping edits, disrupting the continuity of the scenes.
The voiceover narration in both Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger, therefore, encourages the films’ imagined spectators not to get lost within the narrative but to remain acutely aware that they are watching a film. The narration performs a much more understated version of the visual–aural gags Allen deployed in Play it Again, Sam, which function, according to Sam Girgus, to highlight “the materiality of film by bringing attention to the various elements of camera shot and soundtrack that comprise the film” (Girgus 2002: 15–16). The narration literally “foregrounds the tale, the teller, and the act of storytelling” (Schatz 1982: 183), while its potentially off-putting incompatibility with the images onscreen promotes a Brechtian distancing effect akin to breaking the fourth wall through direct address – another device used frequently by Allen in his films.
By asking his viewers to remain at a distance from the text, Allen’s films encourage these viewers to think critically about what they are watching, not only in relation to content but also with regard to form and medium. Specifically, this voiceover narration invites spectators to understand films as rhetorical, or persuasive, texts. As the voiceover narration details exactly what is being seen or forecasts exactly what will be seen, these films highlight and thus problematize the influence that the film text has over perception. Films necessarily position and persuade spectators to see in particular ways, but the alleged invisibility of Hollywood style typically obscures this fact. Allen, in contrast, emphasizes the ways that films show (or tell) us what to see (and think).
In the same way that voiceover narration in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger invites spectators to be attentive to the act of spectatorship and to remain at a distance from the film text, Allen uses editing in Vicky Cristina Barcelona to emphasize the artificiality and materiality of the film text. The conspicuous use of editing devices in Vicky Cristina Barcelona also belies Hollywood’s hegemonic insistence on invisible style. The film deploys almost every possible type of transition, featuring, in addition to the ubiquitous straight cuts, a split screen, a slow dissolve, numerous jump cuts, an iris in and out, and a fade to black. Most of these devices get used only once (with the exception of the jump cuts, which Allen uses in multiple scenes), making them seem all the more noticeable and inconsistent. These affected and sporadic transitions are misaligned with the film’s overall naturalistic and tranquil style and, therefore, stand out as visual oddities that disrupt the organic flow of the film, emphasizing the artificiality of the film text. These edits further alert viewers that what gets seen on screen is not the “whole story” but is the edited, or manipulated, version that Allen wants to be seen.
Finally, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger reveal their self-reflexive impulses about their status as artifacts of a longstanding cinematic tradition through thematic interest in and formal enactments of nostalgia, repetition, and return. The characters of these films incessantly try to recreate the experiences and/or accomplishments of their past to little or no avail. Both films, thus, emphasize the concurrent inevitability and folly of looking back to the past, maintaining a constant tension between the future and the past and juxtaposing the notions of “moving on” with “going back.”
Vicky Cristina Barcelona depicts old lovers who reunite and return to one another, hoping to build a better future together, but always repeating the mistakes of the past: Vicky returns to Doug, although she has come to doubt the validity of monogamy; Vicky also returns to Juan Antonio, despite having declared their affair a mistake; Juan Antonio and Maria Elena return to each other, although they know they are incompatible and combustible as a couple; Judy, Vicky’s aunt, returns to her loveless marriage despite finding passion with another man. Further, when Vicky and Cristina decide their adventure in Barcelona has come to an end (along with the various relationships they created there), they move on with their lives by returning home to New York. The narrative structure enacts this return literally, beginning and ending as Vicky and Cristina walk together through the Barcelona airport.
Despite the centrality of fortune telling within the narrative, Stranger is less a film about the future than one about the past. Allen populates the narrative with characters yearning to recreate bygone days. Alfie wants to relive his youth through marriage with a younger woman and by having a son; then, when this plan falls apart, he longs to return to the comfort of marriage to his first wife. Helena seeks the counsel of a fortune teller so that she might find a new love that replicates the joys of her past marriage; along the way, she becomes obsessed with the possibility that she lived past lives, and she falls in love with a new man fixated on finding the wife he lost. Roy wants to reproduce the success of his first novel, while he and Sally both long to recreate the magic of their early romance. After the novelty Roy once found in Dia begins to wear off, he longs to return to Sally.
Allen’s formal and stylistic choices redouble the nostalgia and tendency toward repetition manifested by the characters of these films. Allen’s soundtrack in Vicky Cristina Barcelona returns to Giulia and Los Tellarini’s chipper song “Barcelona” multiple times. Like the voiceover narration, the jovial tone of this song often feels incongruous with the events unfolding onscreen, and its conspicuous repetition throughout the film calls attention to the characters’ tendencies to make the same mistakes over and over again. Like a character that impossibly longs to relive an aspect of his or her past, the film replays the song incessantly, even if its mood no longer fits with the reality of the diegesis.
Editing in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger also enacts the films’ preoccupation with the subject of nostalgia. Both films, for example, rely heavily on the flashback – an editing device tied directly to notions of memory and the act of reminiscing. Further, the appearance of an iris in and iris out, an editing device primarily associated with early cinema and rather atypical in films produced since the second half of the twentieth century, in Vicky Cristina Barcelona illustrates this nostalgic impulse. In a contemporary film this device may appear antiquated and out of place, if not comical; and, as Garrett Stewart argues, the presence of the “old-fangled closural device of the so-called iris shot” can imply a film’s “metafilmic nostalgia” (2007: 135). This anachronistic device brings to mind other characteristic strategies in Allen’s films such as the use of music that is historically inapt for the diegetic setting (as in the use of older jazz songs in Stranger), or Carol Allen’s description of the mise-en-scène and characters in Stranger as belonging to other historical and generic contexts. This metafilmic nostalgia marks Allen’s most recent films (like all films) as necessarily derived from prior texts and experiential frames. Allen reminds viewers that no film text or act of spectatorship remains unaffected or influenced by the texts, conventions, and traditions that precede it.
The emphasis on nostalgia and looking back in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger recalls others of Allen’s more recent films, including Cassandra’s Dream and Midnight in Paris. In Cassandra’s Dream, two brothers try to make their futures resemble their idealized memories of (or, more precisely, fantasies about) childhood adventures with their Uncle Howard by buying a boat that they cannot afford. In Midnight in Paris, Gil literally returns to the past in order to make himself a better writer through contact with past literary greats. In these films, however, looking back proves to be unproductive, if not dangerous. In Cassandra’s Dream, the brothers embark on a life of crime and eventually die in pursuit of their past-perfect future, discovering along the way that Uncle Howard never was the man they remembered (or, imagined) him to be. In Midnight in Paris, Gil discovers every historical moment includes people longing for an imagined past that never existed, realizes nostalgia is nothing more than fantasy, and learns to embrace his own lived moment.
In the end, then, Allen’s recent films suggest both the futility of looking back and the impossibility of not looking back. It is inevitable that humans try to recreate what has come and gone, but doing so gets them nowhere. This thematic critique of the nostalgic impulse cuts both ways for Allen as a filmmaker. On the one hand, the narrative indictment of these characters’ desires to relive their pasts implicitly chastises those critics who refuse to read Allen’s films as anything but inferior imitations of his earlier masterpieces. These films remind their imagined audiences and critics that no one can go back, no one can live in the past, no one can be what he/she once was – not even a filmmaker as prolific as Allen himself. On the other hand, these nostalgia-laden films do allow Allen to reflect on and offer commentary about his body of work and his role as a filmmaker who shapes and is shaped by Hollywood norms. Along with the films’ redundant voiceover narration, recycled characters, and references to past films, the thematic emphasis on repetition signals the extent to which the film’s characters and storylines are neither novel nor original. It highlights the tendency toward repetition that typifies not only the lives of the characters within the diegesis but also the conventionalized structure of Hollywood narratives.
It should be noted that these cinematic musings on the influence and persuasive authority of the film text do not remain abstract or generalized but specifically attest to Allen’s complicity in making films that shape the beliefs and experiences of their spectators. That is, the films seem to invite spectators not simply to think about how all films operate persuasively (or even manipulatively) but to consider how Allen’s films have done (and continue to do) so. To demonstrate, the split screen that Allen uses in Vicky Cristina Barcelona directly invokes one used in Annie Hall. In the earlier film, the split screen contrasts Annie with her lover Alvy. While Alvy complains to his therapists that the couple’s average rate of sex three times per week seems too little, Annie describes this frequency as too much in a conversation with her own therapist. Placing the characters and their incompatible viewpoints side-by-side accentuates the conflicts that will create an impasse in their doomed relationship.
Similarly, the opening sequence of Vicky Cristina Barcelona frames the leading women in split screen, while the narrator describes their opposing viewpoints on love and relationships. Given the split screen’s resemblance to its use in Annie Hall (and given that Vicky and Cristina are sitting side by side in a taxi cab and could easily be captured in a straightforward two-shot), the device seems especially telling as a signifier of what Stewart might describe as the film’s “metafilmic nostalgia.” At the same time that the shot looks directly at Vicky and Cristina, it looks back to Annie and Alvy. It also matters that when describing the two women, Welch’s narration frames Vicky’s and Cristina’s identities in rather clichéd and reductive terms, as if the split screen serves as a literalization of the artificiality of the gendered stereotypes – the serious monogamist and the wild romantic, the madonna and the whore – that construct these characters. Contrary to O’Hehir’s (2008) assertion that it is hard to believe that the same Allen who made Vicky Cristina Barcelona also made Annie Hall, this device works specifically to remind spectators of such intertextual lineages.
Allen’s repetitions of and references to prior film texts (both those within his oeuvre and those produced by other filmmakers) should not be dismissed as botched attempts at sleight of hand, in which Allen tries to recycle material without audiences noticing. Rather, these conspicuous acts of recycling may be understood more productively as tricks that succeed precisely by failing. Allen cannot create something entirely new; all aesthetic renderings bear intertextual traces (intentional or not) of what has come before. They are always reincarnations with past lives. Neither can spectators interpret a text (or their lived experience) with innocent eyes; audiences are never free of interpretive frames that are shaped by public culture and its artifacts, including (or especially) the cinema. Like Roy, every author necessarily steals from someone else; and, like Helena, all humans interpret the present (and the future) through the lenses of the past. The endings of both Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Stranger thus position their characters to make the same mistakes over and over again. Vicky and Cristina return to their lives in New York harboring the same doubts and fears about love and commitment that lead them to Barcelona in the first place; and the final scene in Stranger ends with two characters who are pursuing new love by literally trying to reconnect with and recreate the past. Humans can predict the future no less than they can escape or recreate the past, but, according to Allen, they will go on trying to do both.
Notes
1 The issues of artistic originality and integrity also arise in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Both Juan Antonio and Maria Elena are painters, and Maria Elena accuses Juan Antonio of stealing his work from hers, asserting that he stifled his own creativity and chose the easier path of imitation.
2 These statistics were taken from the online box office reporting service, Box Office Mojo.
3 Terry Staunton’s (2011) review for Radio Times, the BBC’s online site for film, radio, and television news, similarly describes the narrative characters of Stranger as hackneyed. He writes, “Allen’s script is littered with hollow clichés and predictable scenarios, while his characters are so broadly drawn and speak with such banal voices that it makes it difficult for the viewer to care about what happens to any of them.”
4 The phrase “lady in red” has appeared in both music and film. Singer Allie Wrubel recorded the first “The Lady in Red” in 1935 for the soundtrack of the film In Caliente. The song would be used in a number of Warner Bros. cartoons and became the title of a 1935 Warner Bros. animated feature. In 1986, Chris de Burgh recorded a song called “Lady in Red” for his album Into the Light. This version of the song made a number of appearances in film and television, including the films Working Girl (Mike Nichols, 1988) and American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000) and the television soap opera Days of Our Lives. In 1979, Lewis Teague also directed a 1930s-era gangster film called The Lady in Red. The phrase “woman in red” also has a richly intertextual cinematic history. In 1984, Gene Wilder directed and starred in The Woman in Red, a remake of An Elephant Can Be Extremely Deceptive (Yves Robert, 1976). In Wilder’s film, Teddy Pierce is a married man who becomes carried away with his desire for a model named Charlotte. Pierce develops his obsession with Charlotte when he sees her, dressed entirely in red, standing over a grate with her dress blown over her head. This scene is itself an allusion to a similar scene from The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder, 1955) in which Marilyn Monroe’s character, dressed entirely in white, stands over a subway grate outside of a movie theater.
Works Cited
Allen, C. (2011) “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.” Close-Up Film (Mar. 17). www.close-upfilm.com/2011/03/you-will-meet-a-tall-dark-stranger-12a/ (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
Bailey, P.J. (2001) The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press.
Burke, K. (1937) Attitudes toward History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Edelstein, D. (2011) “A ‘Paris’ review: Woody Allen, in fine form.” National Public Radio (May 20). www.npr.org/2011/05/20/136460594/midnight-in-paris-woody-allens-best-in-a-decade (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
Girgus, S. (2002) The Films of Woody Allen, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Green, D. (1991) “The comedian’s dilemma: Woody Allen’s ‘serious’ comedy.” Literature/Film Quarterly 19.2, 70–76.
Groen, R. (2010) “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger: Same old Woody Allen.” The Globe and Mail (Oct. 1). www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/you-will-meet-a-tall-dark-stranger-same-old-woody-allen/article1369842/ (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
Hirsch, F. (1981) Love, Sex, Death, and the Meaning of Life: Woody Allen’s Comedy. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Honeycutt, K. (2010) “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger – Review.” Hollywood Reporter (15 Oct.). www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/you-will-meet-tall-dark-29599 (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
LaSalle, M. (2008) “Review: ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona.’ ” San Francisco Chronicle (Aug. 15). www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Movie-review-Vicky-Cristina-Barcelona-3199602.php (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
LaSalle, M. (2010) “Review: Woody Allen’s meandering ‘Dark Stranger.’ ” San Francisco Chronicle (Oct. 1). www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Movie-review-Vicky-Cristina-Barcelona-3199602.php (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
Jones, J.R. (2008) “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.” Chicago Reader (Aug. 15). www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/vicky-cristina-barcelona/Film?oid=1055397 (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
Jones, J.R. (2010) “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.” Chicago Reader (Dec. 5). www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/you-will-meet-a-tall-dark-stranger/Film?oid=2340370 (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
Lumenick, L. (2008) “Three’s company.” New York Post (Aug. 15). www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/movies/item_YJ49qqEuEFKs2hXZJujs7J (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
Moore, R. (2010) “Movie review: You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.” Orlando Sentinel (Oct. 13). http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment_movies_blog/2010/10/movie-review-you-will-meet-a-tall-dark-stranger.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+entertainment%2Fmovies%2Fmovieblog+%28Frankly+My+Dear+-+Movies%29 (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
Morris, C. (1987) “Woody Allen’s comic irony.” Literature/Film Quarterly 15.3, 175–180.
Morris, W. (2010) “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger: Allen’s tale never rings true.” Boston Globe (Oct. 1). www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2010/10/01/woody_allens_tall_tale_never_rings_true/ (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
O’Hehir, A. (2008) “Scarlett and Pen.” Salon (Aug. 15). www.salon.com/2008/08/15/vicky_cristina/ (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
Orr, C. (2008) “The movie review: ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona.’ ” The New Republic (Aug. 29). www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/the-movie-review-vicky-cristina-barcelona (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
O’Sullivan, M. (2010) “A brooding and grim encounter.” Washington Post (Oct. 8). www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/you-will-meet-a-tall-dark-stranger,1167025.html (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
Schatz, T. (1982) “Annie Hall and the issue of modernism.” Literature/Film Quarterly 10.3, 180–187.
Staunton, T. (2011) “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.” Radio Times (Mar. 17). www.radiotimes.com/film/hjqps/you-will-meet-a-tall-dark-stranger (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
Stewart, Garrett (2007) Framed Time: Toward a Post-Filmic Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tobias, S. (2008) “Cassandra’s Dream.” The Onion A.V Club (Jan. 17). www.avclub.com/articles/cassandras-dream,3130/ (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
Tobias, S. (2010) “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.” The Onion A.V. Club (Sept. 23). www.avclub.com/articles/you-will-meet-a-tall-dark-stranger,45535/ (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
Toppman, L. (2008) “Yet another wooden Allen drama.” Charlotte Observer (Aug. 14). www.charlotteobserver.com/2008/08/14/127153/yet-another-wooden-allen-drama.html (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
Tutt, R. (1991) “Truth, beauty, and travesty: Woody Allen’s well wrought urn.” Literature/Film Quarterly 19.2, 104–108.
Weiss, S.R. (2002) “Woody Allen: Does he hate Hollywood?” TV Guide (May 3). www.tvguide.com/authors/Sabrina-Rojas-Weiss/19 (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).
Wilson, C. (2010) “Woody Allen is in good form with ‘Tall Dark Stranger.’ ” St. Louis Today (Oct. 15). www.stltoday.com/entertainment/movies/reviews/woody-allen-is-in-good-form-with-tall-dark-stranger/article_553daf1c-fa9c-5a91-86ad-9be715168e0c.html (accessed Oct. 12, 2012).