Vicky Cristina Barcelona [Blu-ray] |  | Actors: Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem
Studio: Weinstein
Category: DVD
This item is no longer available
Rating:  14 reviews
Language: English (Unknown)
Media: Blu-ray
Region: 1
Number Of Discs: 1
ASIN: B001C48E6K
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It must be true that getting out of town can do a fellow a lot of good, because Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the best movie Woody Allen has made in years. Okay, you're right, 2006's Match Point already claimed that honor and, as Allen's first film made in England, established the virtues of getting away from overfamiliar territory (namely Manhattan). But the Woodman's first film made in Spain matches the ice-cold Match Point for crisp authority, and yields a good deal more sheer pleasure besides. Rebecca Hall (Vicky) and Scarlett Johansson (Cristina) play two young Americans, best friends, spending a summer in Catalonia. Vicky is going for a master's in "Catalan identity" (though her Spanish is shaky); Cristina is going along for, oh, just about anything. That soon includes celebrated abstract artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), who's anything but abstract in his forthright proposition that the two join him in his private plane, his travels, and his bed. That he has an insane ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz), who may or may not have tried to kill him is not really an issue until the wife reappears and ... well, consider the possibilities. Vicky Cristina Barcelona isn't exactly a comedy, at least not in the manner of Allen's "early, funny ones," but it's informed by a rueful wit that finds its fullest expression in reflective voiceover commentary. Spoken by Christopher Evan Welch, but surely on behalf of the 73-year-old auteur, this element of the film is neither (as some have charged) patronizing nor uncinematic; rather, it's integral to the movie's participation in a venerable European literary tradition, the sentimental education. Instead of Bergman or Fellini, this time Allen is invoking the François Truffaut of Jules and Jim and Eric Rohmer in his many meditations on the game of love. The entire cast is terrific (both Hall and Johansson get to play "the Woody part" at different points), with Bardem and Cruz especially delightful as exemplars of Old Worldliness. Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe honors every drop of Catalonian sunlight and glint of Gaudí architecture. --Richard T. Jameson
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
 Beautiful Film November 15, 2008
Angela Tucker (Loma Linda, CA United States)
Allen's characters create a beautiful dynamic between themselves, their environment, and how the world chooses to see them. Besides the stunning backdrop of Barcelona, this film offers a pleasing difference in opinions as how one could or should experience life.
Allen's Complex Message About Love November 8, 2008
Benjamin L. Carson (santa cruz, CA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
American college students Cristina and Vicky, finding themselves in possession of excess leisure time and not much pressure to accomplish anything, fly to Catalan for a few months of idyllic luxury, and maybe some intellectual stimulation. Really, both are more inclined to Romance than ideas; though Vicky is particularly reluctant to let that show; she is engaged to be married and so she tries divert herself to nobler questions about art and culture.
An understated and documentary-style narrator -- perhaps in the style of Todd Field's "Little Children" (2006) -- tells us in the beginning that Vicky (Rebecca Hall) values herself according to the commitment she can get; it only stands to reason that she has ended up engaged to a rich, clueless, and amicable New Yorker. Cristina (Scarlet Johanson), who values adventure and "free-thinking" [sic], is the kind of girl who tells you how "things are different in Europe"; like so many college sophomores we know, she chafes against feelings of restriction and boredom in her "American upbringing", and she thinks the European aesthetic life will free her from it. (Vicky's fiance privately recognizes this restlessness as a tired cliché, but Cristina is proud; she thinks it distinguishes her from other Americans.)
It probably isn't an accident that Vicky (Victoria) has Victorian morals, urging her toward rationality and a socially upright life of self-respect, and Cristina (Christ) has Christian ones -- although she seems to be a hedonist at first, she is really just resigned to the inevitability something she knows is sinful, and responds to failure with self-punishment and self-doubting martyrdom; ultimately seeking redemption through self-denial, and a puzzling, confounding delay of worldly gratification.
Their hostess Judy (the amazing Patricia Clarkson) is a flash-forward for Vicky; this is whom Vicky will end up becoming someday. Fear connects Vicky and Judy to one another -- both have opportunities to find great sex and love in their lives, but Allen's main argument comes to the foreground here: /what keeps them from finding love and happiness are the principles in accord with which they give themselves a sense of human worth/. Judy is a quietly terrifying harbinger, an older woman squelched by marriage who -- because she realizes the mistake -- tries to push a younger betrothed into some kind of pleasure and life, some way of being brave where she herself has always been paralyzed with fear. And Vicky plunges right in, more quickly than we expect, with Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), a painter who tries unabashedly to seduce them both.
Vicky's roll in the grass is the short phrase of the film; the long phrase is Cristina's heartbreaking relationship with Juan Antonio and his soulmate Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz). Cristina's life in Barcelona, in some ways, becomes a series of surface reactions against Vicky -- adventuresome instead of sensible, hungry for present-tense experience, rather than practical and future-oriented -- but these are only Cristina's reactions. She's "being bad" to counterbalance Vicky's practical and mainstream insight. But once submerged in the lives of Catalan artist friends, we learn that both are experiencing the same story -- an opportunity for love, which is damned by the foolhardy restraint of one's arbitrary self-image. But the moral compass of the story -- "fear gets in the way" or "love breaks your expectations"--(both standard hollywood morals, of course) is not the point. The film's brilliance is found in the psychology of how those moral realizations come into existence, and what love really is, when it is eventually, and briefly, discovered.
We would expect Vicky, the conservative one, to be the one who gets the long story -- it requires "more of a struggle" to get her into bed, so the seduction will take longer, we think, and so will her discoveries about herself, about love, etc. Kevin Smith or Wes Anderson would have done it that way. But Allen challenges himself to surprise us, and make it oddly plausible that the frigid girl would be the first to melt. And to have her get to be the one who learns the little, superficial lessons in passion...
Meanwhile, the feisty adventuresome one with the shallow, college-junior view of culture and the world...the one who wants to "experiment," in all of the most tiresome ways...she is the one who discovers something calm, unexpected, and ancient, the one who becomes the "missing third ingredient" in a stormy and mature but doomed relationship, maybe recalling Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo's. Cristina is the one who gets the real chance to learn -- not as a reward for her experimental openness, but in spite of her crippling, unacknowledged fears. We hear from the outset that she is "not exactly difficult to maneuver into bed," but the opposite is true. She has to be literally dragged into every Romantic situation that the story presents (against the resistance of food-poisoning, or against potentially crippling self-doubt in the face of a superior woman, a superior partner) for it to work.
Vicky complains loudly, to everyone exposed to her feelings, some version of the line: "I'M TOO AFRAID"...in a hundred evasive words near the begining, and in three sudden clear words at the end. Cristina feels the same way, but cannot say those words, because they remind her of what she is trying to escape. She says instead that she "cannot live (love) like this forever", she must go away to France, she must "find herself" again (and again and again). She thinks of herself as Eve, the destructive and flawed carrier of original sin, and she somehow thinks it is better to avoid the spectral possibility of becoming something else, than to adjust her self-image in the name of the truly great life.
...Everyone in the film glimpses perfection, Allen seems to be saying, and then brings fear into the equation and tosses it aside. Allen's vision of perfect love is neither the reckless passion of a spanish-guitar-drenched evening, nor the Romantic ever-after marital bliss, that he situates at the poles of college women's fantasies. Nor is it the bourgeois aristocratic vision of running away to a rustic place together, to get away from stifling traditions, nor the bacchanale (and equally bourgeois) pretense of the stormy European artistic couple. Allen's vision of love is never made explicit, of course -- why should it be? -- but it is clear that, no matter our expectations or ideals, they /must/ be ruthlessly broken in the name of pleasure and intimacy. Love, in other words, requires our logic of life, consciously and unconsciously, to be broken. Even the most basic expectation -- that love is an experience of symmetry and coupling -- is stripped away. And it is at that moment that the film's Romantic height is reached, in the almost equilateral union of three characters.
This film is, to the global anti-monogamy movement, what Gus van Sant's (1991) /My Own Private Idaho/ was for the introspective bisexual man. In /...Idaho/, River Phoenix's now-legendary character doesn't understand the love he is feeling; it is broken and destined for sadness. But in the film's world-view, that is precisely the love that is /most/ real...Phoenix's great fireside love monologue, delivered through tears to a nearly unconscious Keanu Reeves, is really one of film's greatest Romantic moments. Just like the boy-boy love in /Idaho/, the (carefully unlabeled) girl-girl-boy love in /Vicky Cristina.../ is flawed. We should not mistake this -- as so many critics have -- as a *critique* of polyamory. Unusual love just as prone to failure and disappointment as the storybook kind; Allen's story of this failing threesome is not a trajedy, but a simple truth, about the way we reject the very best love we can get.
But when that love succeeds, it earns the most Romantic, and most sweetly poetic treatment Everyone knows that this is where Cristina was meant to be. Everyone knows she should stay here, a spiritual and intellectual student of Spanish geniuses. This is the perfect love that the audience finds itself celebrating. But since the film is about the conflict of naive youthful visions against reality, and since the film is not about polyamory, but about fear, this celebrated, most clearly perfect form of love, has to end. "You stupid woman," we all say at this moment, "you were getting it on with Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz /at the same time/. While becoming a hip ex-patriate photographer with leisure time for bicycle picnics. And /now/ you want to find yourself."
Such is fear. The only reason you can't have Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz in bed with you at the same time, and the only reason you can't become a seriously good photographer and eat blackberries in the foothills of the Pyreneese for the rest of your life, is because you are afraid of it. In the beginning, polyamory was naughty, something she got to preach about to her overly Victorian friends...but in the end, it was too good to be true, certainly more of an Eden than Eve could ever deserve.
By the way -- that revelation about Cristina's character is foreshadowed a little in the narrator's characterization of her feelings at the beginning of the film, but we see it more clearly in the motif of the painter's father. The lovable and creaky cottage dweller who hides his poetry so that he might quietly punish the world, "for not knowing how to love." The minor poet's dim view of life is echoed by the more prominent characters -- they both get the chance to love amazingly well in the Catalan world. But when Vicky, the intellectual, sees what it all amounts to, she just gets confused and paralyzed. When Cristina, the impulsive one, gets to see this kind of love, she puts it in a box and leaves it behind, because the world apparently doesn't deserve it.
***
Then, finally, look what happens when we return to Vicky. Our Don Juan sports-car driver wins her heart back -- how? Not by confirming her aching desire for reciprocation -- she is desperate to hear him say "it was magical for me too!", desperate to hear him explain: "I am only with Cristina in order to bury my undying feelings for you" or "I shut you out because I thought you would never have me." This is what everyone in the audience expects him to do; everyone expects the master-seducer to find her weak point and exploit it, say to her exactly what she wants to hear. Instead, he says, roughly, "I told you from the very beginning that I was attracted to /both /of you." In that awkward moment, he tells her how beautiful he finds Cristina, and that his fondness for Cristina is undaunted. He is trying, bewilderingly, to seduce Vicky by saying the things that monogamy forbids him to say: "I like you both." And it /works/.
(And is there not something really triumphant about a woman who wants to give up being a good girl...to really get some, and get it good, one last time before she gets married...and instead she gets a bullet in the thumb?)
ALMOST (but not quite) a return to form for Allen October 31, 2008
RMurray847 (Albuquerque, NM United States)
It's been a LONG time since Woody Allen gave us a film that was truly meaningful and had something "deep" to say about life, love and the human condition. My favorite is HANNAH AND HER SISTERS, but CRIMES & MISDEMEANORS and HUSBANDS & WIVES (with Sydney Pollack's and Judy Davis' greatest performances) are Allen's most recent classics. Since that time, almost everyone would agree that his work has been pretty mediocre. In recent years, MATCH POINT saw Allen moving to London and the change in locale seemed to energize him into making his most "un-Woody" film in ages and a darn good psychological crime thriller at that. But SCOOP and CASSANDRA'S DREAM (also London based), offered rapidly diminishing returns. So Allen has moved to Barcelona, Spain with VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA, and once again, the rewards of this new location have jazzed up the Allen formula. However, the film still fails to reward on a philosophical level. It is a surface level delight, with a wry irony about the human condition.
In brief, the story starts with two rich, bored American girls coming to Barcelona for a summer. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is engaged to marry a nice, safe, boring stockbroker type...a man who is mostly interested in picking their perfect home in the perfect NYC bedroom community. Her friend Cristina (Scarlett Johansen) is more a free spirit. She scorns the idea of settling down. Early in their visit, they meet Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), a somewhat well-known artist. He's something of a lady's man, and he brazenly invites them to come to his country villa for a few days, where they will see beautiful sights, drink nice wine and make love. This is after he's known them for 30 seconds. Vicky basically tells him to bug off, but Cristina accepts, and Vicky finds herself going along, ostensibly so that she can keep an eye on Johanssen.
I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that "romantic" (or at least sexual) entanglements follow. They are made far more interesting with the return of Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz), Juan Antonio's ex-wife. To say that she is a "fiery" personality is putting it mildly. She is looney tunes...but also very artistic, sensual and intuitive. She and her ex have one of those relationships where one is the moth and the other the flame...they constantly burn each other yet instinctively they can't avoid each other.
I've tried to reveal little of what actually HAPPENS in the film, because part of the fun is to kind of guess who will fall into bed with whom and when and why. Suffice it to say that this is all frothy fun. While the characters endure some pretty gut-wrenching, soul-searching times...for the viewer there is nothing to take terribly seriously. That isn't necessarily a bad thing...but it's what puts this film just below "classic Woody" status. It's a vigorous and fun film...looser than his movies have been in awhile. But perhaps it's the Spanish flavor that has made it all seem a bit trivial. The characters are all impossibly witty (when AREN'T they in an Allen film?) and there is also a narrator (and this device, of course, makes it a little tough to get drawn in deeply).
But the good outweighs the bad, for certain. Allen's script is VERY fast-moving and really pretty darn funny. His characters are all fairly likeable and there are ample opportunities for all four lead characters to shine. To me, Rebecca Hall was the eye-opener. She is pretty much unknown to me, and I don't know how or why Allen cast her...but he had a pretty good eye with this one. She reminded me of Frances O'Connor (another obscure name, I know...but perhaps a little less so to some). She's strikingly intelligent and she plays her character with a believable mixture of reserve and vulnerability. When unexpected deep feelings hit her, she is "unmoored" from her image of herself, and it's fun to watch her grow and change. It's also GREAT fun to see her in the last scene of the movie...the point she arrives at in the end is the closest Allen comes to poignancy in this film. Javier Bardem is very charismatic. His character is barely more than a caricature (a hot-blooded Spanish artist with amazing skills in seduction!)...but Bardem makes us believe that Juan Antonio really is this person. But what Bardem also does is show that while Juan Antonio wants to seem deep and warm and intuitive...he is really quite shallow and ineffective. Also, if the last time you saw Bardem was as Anton Chigurh in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN...you'll be amazed at how very, very different this guy is. Penelope Cruz has been receiving a lot of accolades, and she is certainly a character who truly stirs the pot when she arrives. To me, the part is the most underwritten of the four, and thus a little less successful. However, I don't blame Cruz...she really pulls off the almost manic/depressive personality of Maria Elena with great energy. It is Scarlett Johanssen who comes off the worst here. I'm not a huge fan of hers to start with...she can be a remarkably still and self-possessed actress...but I actually find her stillness not so much representing an inner life, but to show dullness. I'm sure Scarlett is sharp as a tack and probably great fun in real life...but her acting, very effective in roles like GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING, leaves her feeling stiff and unconvincing in parts like in VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA that call for vivacity and some raw sensuality. She is a contrast to the other women on the screen...but it's not really a contrast between fire and ice. It's a contrast between fire and another fire that has been doused with water and is now just a burnt-out ember.
If you've never liked Allen's movies before (and I know many people who can't abide him)...I feel there's a chance you might actually enjoy this one. Except for the VERY Allen-like voice of the narrator, the Spanish setting creates a warmer, more colorful tone than we've seen in awhile. If you're a fan of Allen, then I believe this is a must-see.
catalan September 7, 2008
MICHAEL ACUNA (Southern California United States)
People have been waiting for years for Woody Allen to make another "Annie Hall" but it is not going to happen. Allen has moved on and sometimes up from that classic: the benchmark of the 30+ years of his making films.
Without putting too much effort into it, I can think of a number of very fine films that Allen has made since "AH": "Another Woman," "Hannah and her Sisters," "Manhattan Murder Mystery," "Manhattan," "Broadway Danny Rose" and on and on. But he has also made some clunkers like "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion" and "Small Time Crooks." All in all a great career: one made up of hits and misses, par for the course with someone who has been making films for a long time.
Now comes his newest: "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" made in Barcelona and redolent of that beautiful city: hot dusty, passionate, sultry, crazy, always bursting forth with life and love...a city in which all is possible, everyone is open to experience everything...or should be.
Into this milieu comes two American women: Vicky (Rebecca Hall: pretty yet bland) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson: beautiful and luscious) both looking for something: but what?
Vicky is the more realistic of the friends. Working on a Master's on Catalan identity which she is pursuing despite knowing almost any Spanish!
Cristina (Johansson), on the other hand, is into suffering, passion and risk. She recently finished a 12-minute film on why love is hard to define and has just broken up with the latest of a string of boyfriends.
It's Cristina, a bodacious blonde who naturally catches the eye of painter Juan Antonio (a womanizer: charming and sexy Javier Bardem) at an art opening. He's just been through a difficult divorce from Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz in a chew the scenery with relish performance), a wife who stuck a knife in him, but that doesn't stop this unabashed seducer from chatting them both up and inviting them to spend a ménage-à-trois weekend with him. "Life is short and full of pain," he candidly explains, "and this is a chance for something special."
Juan Antonio, who eventually romances both, teaches them about Love and Life and leaves them both with a richer knowledge of themselves and a working knowledge of the world in general. Juan Antonio is the Voltaire of Lotharios.
The Spanish duo of Bardem and Cruz bulldoze their way through this movie with their wit, charm and unwitting knowledge of what works in film acting often over-powering the relative blandness of Hall and Johansson.
"Vicky Cristina Barcelona" is not the best film that Woody Allen has ever made but neither is it near the worst and as such it is a pleasure: rich with the patented Allen world vision and irony that makes us smile with recognition of something both familiar yet unusual and remarkable.
What's It All About, Woody? September 1, 2008
SORE EYES (Oamaru)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Spoiler Alert***
When I go to Europe, I get propositioned-a lot-in metro cars, in cafes, on the street. It's not because of my looks but rather because passion, beauty and sex are a function of life Spain, France and Italy. And so it happens for Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Christina (Scarlett Johansson). While spending a summer holiday in Barcelona, Vicky and Christina are given a "best offer" from Juan Antonio (the dreamy Javier Badem), to fly away for the weekend. Vicky is hostile to his offer-she knows what she wants-a drama free relationship with her fiancee. Christina finds the offer and the man interesting and states her desire to go. To protect her friend, Vicky goes along for the ride, but finds herself caught in the undertow of love and succumbs unexpectedly to Juan Antonio's gentle seduction.
The three return to Barcelona and Vicky returns to her work and her plans for marriage. Christina begins a relationship with Juan Antonio. Juan's ex-wife, Maria Elena (the gorgeous Penelope Cruz) tries to kill herself and Juan tells Christina they have to take care of her until she gets on her feet. Oddly, the ethereal Christina acts like a salve in the tumultuous relationship between Maria Elena and Juan Antonio. The three of them fall in love and life is going along swimmingly until Vicky begins to feel a familar desire-one which Maria Elena correctly labels "perpetual discontent" in an emotional tearful moment.
In the meantime, Vicky continues to yearn for Juan Antonio, and her discontented Aunt schemes to set the two up. They meet for a seductive lunch, but seduction is in the head as much as the heart and taking from an earlier scene where Christina tells Juan Antonio that he shouldn't blow it with with something small-the wrong pair of shorts for example, he blows the seduction of Vicky completely with the wrong kind of life-a life of drama which the staid Vicky can not really imagine being a part of.
This film has it's problems. First and foremost, Christopher Evan Welch talks over some of the scenes-almost like he was presenting script direction, "Vicky felt x, while Christina felt...". I'm a fan of "show, don't tell" and would have preferred to "get it" on my own. With this style of presentation, Allen feels a bit controlling, as if he's going to tell his audience his message because we're too dumb to infer it on our own. But whatever the problems with Vicky Cristina Barcelona, I loved it. I love Allens exploration of culture. I saw Annie Hall when I was five and I've been intrigued with Allens brand of dysfuction ever since.
Vicky Christina Barcelona is a gorgeous film, you'll enjoy the background shots of La Sagrada Familia and Park Guell. Like earlier Allen films Manhattan or Annie Hall where New York goes a long way in effecting the psyche and neurosis of the characters-Barcelona and the charm of the spanish country side disenchant Vicky and Christina with the lives they are living back in the States. Setting is never just a backdrop in an Allen film.
A great film with gorgeous actors and a contemplative script. Worth seeing.
If you enjoy Vicky Cristina Barcelona, I'd recommend Margot at the Wedding, Eagle vs. Shark, The Housekeeper and all of the Pedro Almodovar films, particularly All About My Mother(especially if you want more Penelope Cruz and Barcelona) and Talk to Her (Hable con Ella)
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