Halfway to a Threeway

[August 13th, 2008]

Those of us who love Woody Allen can be forgiven for wishing away the last decade of his career. Since 1999’s Sweet and Lowdown, the director who once so effortlessly found comedy in psychoanalysis, moral qualms and neurotic terror has been visibly laboring, oscillating between wheezing farces (Anything Else) and morbid tragedies (Match Point, which wasn’t half as interesting as its inspiration, Crimes and Misdemeanors). While we, his loyal acolytes, prayed in vain for the Bluebird of Existentialism to sing about the absurdities of age, he instead focused on the juvenile attributes of Scarlett Johansson. His new muse hasn’t been able to carry his tune. She’s been strained and vacant, and in her company he seemed the same.

So it was not encouraging to hear that Allen’s latest project would center on Johansson’s participation in a ménage a trois. (Don’t knock threesomes—it’s sex with two people I love!) And yet Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a breezy triumph for Allen, not so much a return to form as a discovery of new perspective. It’s the delight of an old jester discovering that his best material—youth, and its illusions—is inexhaustible.

Rebecca Hall is Vicky. Johansson is Cristina. (Barcelona plays itself.) They are two young Americans who escape the standard postgraduate aimlessness by drifting to Spain, accompanied by a droll, disaffected narrator (Christopher Evan Welch) who notes their every stop with an attentiveness that suggests he has some familiarity with Jules and Jim. (Self-awareness is one of the movie’s most endearing qualities—the soundtrack is dominated by a Catalan guitar tune called “Barcelona,” which serves as a constant, nudging reminder that, hey, this is all happening in Spain.) Enjoying a glass of wine at a cafe, the two are approached by local painter and notoriously fiery lover Juan Antonio, who suggests that the three of them should travel to a nearby village, where they can look at art and, “if all goes well, we will make love.” The appeal of this proposition is increased dramatically by the fact Juan Antonio is played by Javier Bardem, who portrays the sensuous Spaniard as the direct inverse of his hitman Chigurh in No Country for Old Men—once again, his flat, hood-eyed features suggest a confidence born of knowing exactly what he wants to do, only this time he wants to penetrate you with something other than a cattle gun.

Cristina is flattered by his attentions; Vicky is less enchanted with “this charmingly candid wife-beater.” The characters of Vicky Christina Barcelona proceed down a sliding scale of inhibition, with Vicky at one end and Juan Antonio at the other, and Cristina placidly lolling in between. But even the painter is surpassed by his ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz), who comes barreling into the picture in a hurricane of tear-stained eye makeup and Spanish invective. (Juan Antonio is always hopelessly insisting that she speak English, a demand for courtesy that only enrages her further.) Cruz’s character is a European stereotype—the free-spirited earth mother with a passion so furious it becomes a kind of prison—but it’s a joke she’s in on, and relishes.

So what of the three-way? It doesn’t pan out as Juan Antonio intends, and when it does take place it is comprehensively explained by the narrator but only hinted at onscreen—but the sex isn’t as important as the intention. Just as he was back in the days of Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters, Woody Allen is fascinated by the fatefulness of personality, how it routes the flow of life. Vicky thinks without acting. Cristina acts without thinking. Juan Antonio has crafted a system in which he gets to act exactly how he likes because he seems to have thought about it a great deal. But then Maria Elena blows in, as a reminder that none of these dispositions is a formula for happiness. The trick, so far as there is one, is to accept your own fortune with grace and ease, to realize that you are who you are and there’s no need to wish it away. For once, Allen pulls off the trick.