Woody Allen has made some great movies over the years, and
Vicky Christina Barcelona is one of his best. While spending a summer in Barcelona, best friends Vicky and Christina come across exciting Spanish painter Juan Antonio, who promptly propositions them for a weekend getaway and possible three-some. Intrigued, Christina goes along with it, and Vicky comes to try and keep her friend from making a mistake. Later, things get further complicated by the appearances of Vicky's fiance Doug, and Juan Antonio's ex wife Maria Elena. This is somewhat familiar territory for Allen. Outside of the Spanish setting, Allen has dealt with these kind of love stories before, but never in this way. This is the most sensual movie he's ever made, oozing all aspects of love and sex in every frame. His dialog is top notch, and he gets tremendous performances from all of his actors.
Javier Bardem can be such an imposing figure onscreen. If I didn't already know how talented of an actor he was, I would've never thought the same guy could play Juan Antonio and Anton Chigurh from
No Country for Old Men. In that movie he was an ominous figure of death and evil, in
Vicky Christina Barcelona he's a sensitive, passionate, and charmingly sexual presence. He's so effortlessly good I think many people overlook his versatility because of the fiery performance given by his Spanish colleague Penelope Cruz as Maria Elena. It's a big showy role, and she's tremendous in it. The interplay she and Bardem have gives such a sense of history, the way they talk over one another (in two languages!), their body language when together, everything about them tells the audience that these two people really do have a lifetime of shared experiences. Surprising, given that this is her third time working with Allen, but Scarlett Johansson's role of Christina is the most underwritten of the main 4 parts. Still, she does some good work with what she's given. But the biggest surprise for me was from Rebecca Hall as Vicky. I'd seen her in a few other movies before (
Frost/Nixon,
The Prestige), but here the British actress dons a perfect American accent, and gives a tremendously layered performance of a woman at a crossroads in her life. She's in love with two men. Does she stay with the safe pick that she loves but has little passion for? Or does she take her chance with the spirited artist in a relationship that would likely not last?
It's Allen's best looking movie since Gordon Willis shot the gorgeous black-and-white of
Manhattan, and that was 30 years ago. So much credit must go to the superb Spanish cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe. That he was not nominated for an Oscar for his work is shameful. This is one of the most beautifully, sensuously photographed movies of the past few years. Of course, it helps that Aguirresarobe's photography is in support of a terrific script by Allen. He still throws in a bit of the "Woody Allen-type" character, Vicky definitely has shades of the typical main character that Allen often played in his own movies. But I never get tired of listening to Allen's intelligent characters talk their way through his movies. It sometimes seems like he's one of the few filmmakers that actually gives a shit about the dialog in their movie.
It's nice to see Allen in top form again. Even after some of the crap he's put out in the past few years, every once in a while he'll still give us a
Match Point, or
Sweet and Lowdown. It's not on the level of his greatest movies
Annie Hall and
Crimes and Misdemeanors. But even if it's not a masterpiece, I think we can happily add
Vicky Christina Barcelona to the list of Allen's triumphs.
Charlie Kaufman is an endlessly fascinating writer. He takes strange ideas that many people have, and in his screenplays creates worlds that allow those things to take place. His first movie as a writer, 1999's Being John Malkovich, starts with the basic idea of: what if you could see the world through someone elses eyes? From there he created a surreal comic masterpiece starring John Cusack as a puppeteer who finds a portal into the mind of actor John Malkovich (who plays a fictionalized version of himself). With his next movie, Adaptation., directed by Malkovich's director Spike Jonze, he gave us a movie sort of about Charlie Kaufman. At least, a version of Charlie (brilliantly played by Nicolas Cage). A version that is having so much trouble adapting the book The Orchid Thief into a movie that he begins writing a screenplay about a guy named Charlie Kaufman having trouble adapting The Orchid Thief into a movie. And that's only the basic idea behind it. He most recently made his directorial debut with the supremely odd Synecdoche, New York, about a theater director who begins staging a play of his life, acted on a replica of New York City built in a warehouse, employing thousands of cast and crew to help him examine his life by acting it out in front of him, aided by his assistant, directing an actor playing him (as well as the one playing his assistant), and so on and so on down the rabbit hole.
The crowning achievement in his catalog, in my eyes, is the 2004 comic romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which teamed him again with French music video director Michel Gondry (who had previously directed Kaufman's script Human Nature, unseen by me). It concerns the relationship of Joel and Clementine, characters extraordinarily brought to life by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. Kaufman started from the idea of erasing someone from your memory (who hasn't wanted to do that before?) and the impact that memories have on us as people. The way a loved one can get so associated with something that to remove it would be to remove a part of your own being. The impulsive Clem has had Joel erased from her memory by a company called Lacuna that provides such a service. As a way of getting back at her, Joel decides to erase her from his memory. Joel at one point asks Dr. Mierzwiak (the always brilliant Tom Wilkinson) if there's any chance of brain damage caused by the erasing. He answers "Well, technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage." There's an achingly sad moment when you realize that Joel doesn't remember the song "My Darling Clementine", even though it had deep meaning to him long before meeting Clem. It had become so associated with her in his mind that to remove her removes all traces of the song as well as his childhood favorite, Huckleberry Hound. For the majority of the movie we travel with Joel through the good and bad memories of the two years he spent with Clem. It's hysterical, heartbreaking, amazingly true to life while being totally surreal. The brilliant score by Jon Brion is worth mentioning. It plays more like an accompaniment to the action onscreen, instead of trying to underline it, or try and inform the audience how to react emotionally. It's one of my favorite scores in recent memory. Actually, come to think of it, the movie as a whole is one of my favorites of recent years.
