Today being Valentine's Day, I took my wonderful wife to see Vicky Cristina Barcelona at her request even though I saw this just a couple of weeks ago and rated it as a 7/10 film. On second viewing I think that's about fair- perhaps even a little on the stingy side. What stood out for me far more this time was the cynicism behind the film- every motivation and every relationship was treated as pretentious and false in its own way. As if Woody was simply sick of everything. I found it harder to engage with the protagonists- as it often is when a film is filled with spoilt people in big houses with no discernible source of income, but that's another matter- because I was more aware of the bitterness below the surface. I think that's a strength of the film, though, you can suspend disbelief and find yourself charmed by a film where for a short period of time people step out of their comfort zone and learn about themselves. A Spanish Roman Holiday, if you will. The easy flow and soundtrack-driven pace of the film allied to the use of a narrator (is there any better way to hint to an audience that it's okay to switch off their critical faculties?) aids this process tremendously and is probably the reason behind the film's relative success at the box office.
On the other hand, you can view the film as a critique of pretensions and the way that the desire to appear as a tortured artist or as a fully 'together' and in control are simply two sides of the same coin. Interestingly, Vicky and Cristina are shown arriving and leaving via Barcelona Airport at the beginning and end of the movie via a split-screen in which their positions are swapped- as if to represent the way in which they have to some extent swapped what they want out of life with one another.
In fact the only character to come out of the film with his 'image' intact is Doug (played by Chris Messina who does this kind of dull straight-laced lawyer/broker type of role really well, as he showed in the risible Made of Honour). I was going to say 'come out sympathetically', but his character doesn't elicit sympathy- even though he's cuckolded throughout- simply because he's a bit of a dick. Nonetheless, he is the only main character to have been honest throughout the film. Even Javier Bardem's frank and forthright Juan Antonio is portrayed as playing out a pretence of honesty as Penélope Cruz's Maria Elena explains when massaging him to relieve a tension headache "Oh, to the world, he's carefree, nothing matters, life is short and with no purpose kind of thing. But all his fear just goes to his head". Interestingly, and I say this having seen the film twice, I'm certain that during the Spanish dialogue in that scene Cruz refers to Bardem's character as Javier and not Juan Antonio.
And so, this is definitely a film I enjoyed seeing a second time. In fact, it had made me feel eager to re-engage with Woody Allen after sulking about his poor calibre output over the last twenty years and ignoring him for quite some time.
