The Woody Allen Factor

Finally, after much to-do, I got around to seeing Woody Allen's newest entry into the 'Woody Allen Canon', 'Vicky Christina Barcelona', at the Angelika in Greenwich Village.  I have always been prepared to like Allen's films.  Indeed, I am one of the defenders of the less-than-perfect late 90s pictures, such as The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and Small-Time Crooks.  But Allen has truly entered his latest renaissance.  Far from the pessimistic world-view of Match Point, or the screwball-comedy schtick of Scoop, Vicky Christina Barcelona should rank right up there with the vintage Allen films that crop up on 'Best-Of' lists the world over.  It represents Allen's return to a balance of comedy, tragedy, and romantic pathos, an honest examination of love, sex, madness and the artistic mindset.  

The plot happily avoids typical cliches of the 'stranger in a strange land' motif.   This is not, in other words, Under the Tuscan Sun.  Vicky and Christina find their romantic painter in Juan Antonio, played with warmth by Javier Bardem.  But Juan Antonio does not know more than either woman; he merely has a different outlook.  The film avoids endorsing either the uptight and pragmatic Vicky, the passionate and unfocused Christina, or, for that matter, the elegant and fiery Juan Antonio.  The solution to life's mysteries, particularly love and art, evade them all.

Vicky Christina Barcelona also represents a return to a deeper interest in the concerns of women, a la Hannah and Her Sisters.  Juan Antonio may be the catalyst for Vicky and Christina's self-examination, but the film is much more interested in that self-examination than it is in normative heterosexual relationships.  The man provides an outlet for self-expression, but he remains little more than a cipher through which to view these complex female characters.  Even Juan Antonio's muse, his ex-wife Maria-Elena, is more of an artist.  She hands him his art, inspiring it and shaping it, so that there is no great art without her.  Far from being a male fantasy about having two (and eventually three) women at once, the women dominate the film and the man.  This is more about their desire, and their art, than it is about his.    

Allen has made much of his pessimism and his atheism, which appear to go hand in hand.  But ultimately, Vicky Christina Barcelona is a hopeful film, a film about real life.  There is a sense that both nothing and everything has changed.  The return to New York may represent a return to the uptight bourgeois world they at first abandoned, or it may represent a new phase in the lives of the two women.  Juan Antonio and Barcelona has not provided the answer to the central desires of Vicky and Christina, but there is no indication that New York will give them any more closure.  Life will continue to be about searching for what they want, what they need, what gives them fulfillment.  But it is not a fruitless search that will leave them empty.  Both Vicky and Christina experience transitory fulfillment and happiness, both find something they lacked.  All in all, the film is less pessimistic than any of Allen's more recent films.  While it cannot claim to provide answers, it does raise some fascinating questions.