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Rating: Vicky and Christina, long-time friends, embark on a trip to Barcelona for different reasons: the former wants to complete a master's degree on Catalan identity through direct contact with the local culture while the latter needs a period of relaxation after some professional challenges. Both girls are characterized from the start by two diametrically opposed ways of conceiving love, specifically Vicky, engaged to a brilliant New Yorker, stays firmly grounded and aspires to a serene married life, unlike Christina, who is constantly seeking an overwhelming passion. The meeting with a charming Spanish painter will challenge their respective positions. Indeed, the artist, Juan Antonio, manages to take them to Oviedo for a weekend during which Christina suffers an ulcer attack, confining her to the hotel for a day, allowing Juan Antonio and the skeptical Vicky to get to know each other better; a brief journey that will end in his bed. Back in Barcelona, Vicky receives a phone call from her fiancé, announcing his imminent arrival and intention to marry her in the Spanish city, while Christina continues to see Juan Antonio but with a third wheel, the painter's neurotic ex-wife. Suddenly, the roles are reversed: Vicky feels an increasingly uncontrollable attraction towards the painter while Christina matures the impression that she can't maintain her ménage à trois for much longer...
After recent critical failures, a skeptical attitude towards Woody Allen's new film could be partially understandable. Indeed, after that gem called "Matchpoint," two other feature films of little worth or excessively below the expectations raised by a cult director like Allen have followed. However, with "Vicky Christina Barcelona," one abandons the gloom of the sinful London of "Cassandra’s Dream" and delves into the vivid Catalan landscape, as if to underscore the transition from that family drama to a new comedy. The usual? No. Here lies the first point in Allen's favor: "Vicky Christina Barcelona" does not correspond to the typical Allenian comedy. The long and controversial dialogues that have always typified his screenwriting style survive, but the main theme, love, is cleansed of the New York couple's neuroses (an old Woody trope) and placed in a new, original context.
At the basis of the discussion about the joys and sorrows of love life lies a divide, that is, the different love approach criteria of Europeans and Americans. From the very first minutes of the screening, it is clear that the protagonists, whose ways of living love are explored by the narrating voice, are united by a certain insecurity amidst their diversity: Vicky rejects the impetuosity of feelings while Christina flaunts it overly, revealing herself in jargon as "all hat and no cattle." Christina attempts to penetrate Juan Antonio's bohemian world with little success, even experiencing a change of course in her choices and priorities following an obvious confrontation with the relationship between the painter and his ex-wife. The girl realizes she could never live a burning passion like that of Maria Helena and Juan Antonio and understands her friend might not be so wrong when describing her as "nothing but a romantic teenager." Observing the characters and the plot, under certain methods of analysis, it seems almost as if Allen himself, along with his new heroines, questions what he had previously said about love in "Annie Hall," "Manhattan," and all his feature films, as if his typical neurotic couple, observing the uncontrollable violence of European love, were left stunned and uncertain about the actual validity of their conjectures, stunned and uncertain like the expressions of Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall upon their return to New York.
Everything said so far can certainly be a point of disagreement for many, but on one aspect, there can be no disagreement: a cast in excellent shape. Johansson (Christina) and Hall (Vicky) are not intimidated by the overwhelming mass of concepts their respective characters embody, achieving a convincing if not superb performance, as in the case of Javier Bardem (Juan Antonio), who illustrates the painter's figure with impeccable ease and avoids common stereotypes about artists in general, and Penelope Cruz (Maria Helena), perhaps the best of all for her extraordinary intensity, capable of recalling the great divas of the past, first and foremost our Anna Magnani. And then there’s Barcelona. The city's protagonism bursts through the vibrancy of its architecture and the delicacy of the guitars, proving not only a backdrop of great visual impact but above all an indispensable scenic ingredient. Never has a title been so truthful.
In "Vicky Christina Barcelona," Woody changes, exchanges, reverses, and subverts, dares (See the attention the critics and the media world have shown towards the Johansson\Cruz sapphic scene), and thus does not bore. A pleasant surprise for those who, after "Scoop" and "Cassandra’s Dream," would not have bet a penny on him and an unparalleled satisfaction for all his detractors, already ready to accuse him of repetitiveness and to laugh maliciously sarcastic, thinking that soon all that would distinguish his films would be only the character of the opening credits.
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