Skip to main content

VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA. Dir Woody Allen. 2008

Image result for movie images vicky christina barcelona


Love and sunshine for Vicky and Christina, two young American girls spending a summer in Barcelona. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is engaged and has come to stay with a family friend whilst doing research for her thesis. She is confident, mature and not to be trifled with. Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) is unattached, sexually available, sexually uninhibited and keen to be trifled with. When the two girls are approached in a restaurant by bohemian artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) with a direct offer to come away for the weekend with him and enjoy a sexual threesome, Cristina is game.

Vicky agrees to go along as chaperone but barely tolerates Juan Antonio’s well rehearsed seduction techniques and apparently innocent openness. Cristina slips upstairs to his room for some eagerly anticipated lovemaking but falls ill and spends the weekend alone in her own bed, throwing Vicky and Juan Antonio together.

Rebecca Hall is excellent as the modern, educated young woman with a life plan, a strong interest in her career and a sound understanding of human behaviour. Acerbic and impatient at first, she begins to see a more appealing side to Juan Antonio when he stops playing the Lothario. Bardem clearly relishes the opportunity to play the relaxed seducer after his chilling performance in ‘No Country For Old Men,’ and exchanging the psychotic coldness of that role for a mischievous warmth and sensitivity.

Johansson is underused, playing the sexy girl again when she is capable of far more. Woody Allen used her well in ‘Match Point’ where she played a dangerously neurotic femme fatale but here, she merely has to be aimless and discontented. Penelope Cruz is sultry and glowering as the unstable ex-wife, Maria Elena, pouting and storming, outspoken and fragile as a child, and Chris Messina gives a natural and realistic performance as Vicky’s new husband.

Despite the intrusive voiceover, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is funny and touching with an ironic perspective on sexual etiquette and morality, and the photogenic cast and sunny locations are a visual holiday.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Running ‘till your nipples bleed

An email from a friend of mine arrives; she complains that, at work, she is routinely subjected to gruesome accounts of female colleagues’ intimate medical procedures and gynaecological problems. I am all commiseration because I, too, have had years of listening to workplace chats about periods, childbirth and sex lives. Oh please. Later, I wander off for a walk in the early evening sunshine and it is so silent and so beautiful that I flop down on the grass and lay awhile gazing out over the rolling fields, and the mouth of the river, and fall into a reverie. Two men pass by. A few minutes later sounds of women’s talk float nearer and, by the time the two females of the species draw level with me, I have risen up from my deliciously recumbent position in the meadow, alert and tense, something like a meerkat. “I do feel for her. Going down that IVF route is such an emotional roller coaster. I was never prepared for how terrible it was going to be.” I remain frozen in my meerkat position...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ian McEwan. Amsterdam. London: QPD, 1998

McEwan’s novel about ambition, personal betrayal and revenge features Clive, a modern composer trying to complete a major orchestral work, his friend Vernon, an editor trying to save his ailing newspaper, and Garmony, an unscrupulous right-wing politician on the rise. In common, all three have, in previous years, been lovers of recently dead Molly. They meet at her funeral and the story follows the next few weeks of the men’s lives. Vernon and Clive act as one another’s conscience, each infuriating the other. Which is more important, honesty, friendship and trust or Vernon’s newspaper and Clive’s symphony? The novel presents the difficulties of balancing personal and public morality, the importance of private shame and public reputation, the conflict between taking a moral decision for the greater good, or putting first ones own desires. Not just a simple exposé of a politician with a vulnerable side, Amsterdam is full of double standards and surprises, and takes a long, cynical look a...
Post a Comment
Read more

OLD JOY. Dir Kelly Reichardt. 2005

Dropout Kurt arrives in town and calls up his old friend, earnest father-to-be Mark to suggest a camping trip out in the forest, away from the city. They haven’t seen each other for some time and the film suggests a desire for intimacy as well as a quest for peace. Something of a lost soul, Kurt is emotional and, at times, to be pitied. He lives outside society, in a world of new age type retreats and travels, which seem to have left him out on the margins. In contrast, Mark has a home and a pregnant partner, and tunes his car radio in to phone-ins with much loud chat about the state of society in America but he seems only half alive. They drive out of town, with the camera as passenger, which gazes out of the car window while a gorgeous soundtrack by Yo La Tengo sets a mellow mood. The use of extended silence makes me a little uneasy; it’s hard to get away from memories of Deliverance, and a sense of apprehension. In the city, the glass of the car windows insulates us...
Post a Comment
Read more