A different kind of film from the Woody Allen oeuvre, Vicky Christina Barcelona is lightweight, lighthearted, and liberal, but also surprisingly thoughtful, romantic, and subtly erotic.
An actor’s showcase more than anything else, we get a quartet of fine performances here that range from good-to-excellent while romantic tension between all four buoys the story along. Film also has one fatal flaw, though: unnecessary and overbearing narration that threatens to sink everything.
Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Christina (Scarlett Johansson) are two young post-college Americans who travel to Spain for the summer and stay with Vicky’s aunt Judy (Patricia Clarkson) and uncle Mark (Kevin Dunn) in Barcelona.
While at an art gallery, Christina becomes smitten with painter Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem); later that night, he approaches both of them with an offer to fly with him to his hometown of Oviedo, where they can “sightsee, drink wine, and make love.”
Christina accepts, and Vicky tags along to protect her. Soon both of them end up in romantic interludes with the painter. But a wild card enters the mix, Juan Antonio’s ex-wife Maria Elena, who threatens to disrupt the tryst(s). Things, however, aren’t always as they seem, as the girls begin to learn more than they might care to about themselves.
Bardem is excellent, particularly when paired with Cruz, who’s similarly good despite having much less screen time. But when they’re together the sexual tension is palpable: feisty and rapturous, they light up the film, which becomes something else entirely, and something I wanted to see more of.
Not to take away from the girl’s story, which is well-played; Vicky and Christina are not your usual American tourists overseas, but thoughtful, intelligent young women who have a lot to say – and a lot to learn.
Johansson is solid but outshone by Hall, who is something of a revelation as Vicky, torn between her feelings for Juan Antonio and her fiancée back in the US (Johansson and Hall previously co-starred in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige).
Though director Allen’s influences aren’t always apparent, they’re fully present in two memorable scenes: a tracking shot following Christina as she retrieves some aspirin for Juan Antonio and returns to find Maria Elena assisting him, and a key scene between Vicky and Juan Antonio shot far above an out-of-focus Barcelona, where we pan back and forth between them and develop a sense of vertigo. Masterful stuff.
Otherwise, though, location work in Barcelona hasn’t been used to its full potential. Music is almost nonexistent (save for a touching guitar solo) though the unrelenting narration would drown it out anyway.
About that narration: it’s this American-accented, nasally-intoned near-parody from Christopher Evan Welch that I wanted to shut up not two minutes into the film (it’s like that episode of Seinfeld where George buys the book-on-tape and then recoils in horror after hearing it: “I can’t listen to this. It sounds like me!”).
It never stops – I don’t think there’s five minutes of film without it – though I managed to block it out of my mind after awhile. And it’s always just stating the obvious, telling instead of showing, making the film feel far more shallow and straightforward than anything on the screen would actually imply.
Sample narration: “Juan Antonio leaves in the dead of night. Christina tries to sleep.” This is spoken over two shots of Juan Antonio getting in his car in the dead of night, and Christina tossing in bed. C’mon Woody: cut us some slack.
