S P L I N T E R E D | L I G H T

Life is the ultimate work of art. Not only is this true, it is the tagline for Woody Allen’s new film, Vicky Christina Barcelona. But for Allen, who has now directed over 40 films and written many more, defining life as a work of art means that it is primarily an unfinishable painting, an unresolving story, an inscrutable psyche. Always a psychological director, recently Allen’s films have become more like thought experiments than the gloriously messy, over analyzed outpourings they once were. These characters were designed to be combined in carefully measured amounts to a previously selected location and the results recorded for analysis.

The narrator in Vicky Christina Barcelona immediately presents the two women from the title as foils of each other. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) has brown hair and loves order, consistency, fidelity, and commitment. Christina (Scarlett Johanssen) has blond hair and loves, movement, spontaneity, romance, and experience. They arrive together in the exquisite Spanish city to spend the summer–Vicky to work on her master’s thesis, Christina just to exist. When they meet the infamous painter, Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), he is mysterious and provocative, exactly what Christina is looking for and Vicky dreads. He approaches the women with an invitation to join him on his private plane, fly to an unknown city, view a statue that is a great inspiration to him, drink wine, and make love.

After they have done all of the above, Vicky is torn between her common-sense and newly discovered passions, while Christina has moved in with Juan Antonio. Juan Antonio is like art incarnate. “I affirm life despite everything,” he says. Everything, in this case, is all the pain and suffering in the world, specifically his stormy relationship with his muse and soul-mate, Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz). Stormy is an understatement. Their marriage and divorce, while massively productive artistically, ended in attempted murder. When Maria Elena again attempts suicide Juan Antonio brings her to live with him and Christina. Simultaneously Vicky’s fiancé flies in from New York and they get married. For a time Christina’s presence acts as a balancing force between Maria Elena and Juan Antonio, and Vicky tries to be sensible and content in her new marriage.  

Now, in Barcelona Vicky and Christina must wrestle with the effects of their divergent philosophies against the backdrop of Spanish architecture, oceans, and forests. In the casting, locations, and cinematography, the film is painstakingly beautiful. There is a perpetual golden glow–the sun’s rays washing everything at a slanting angle–as if it is always five o’clock on a summer afternoon. But the beauty of the locations and passion of the actors is so pervasive and austere that I found it desensitizing.

Vicky Christina Barcelona is a white-collar bohemian fantasy. The characters are that .01% of the population that can live in Europe with infinite art and endless money, free to explore any avenue they want in the hell that their impulses create. As the characters are too obviously walking world-views and psychological experiments, the conclusions are also too obvious and entirely inevitable. This creates a chilliness that the visual warmth of the film cannot thaw. Since life is art it is painful and messy by definition. The only way to live is to succumb to its whims. It will destroy those who resist its free expression. So despite the film’s beauty and intense emotion, I watch it from behind glass.