Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Woody Allen’s latest film is about two American women, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), who spend a summer in Barcelona. Many of the film’s themes were previously discussed on this blog.

Vicky is moderate, practical, conventional, cautious and she has definite ideas about what she wants from life and relationships. She has bourgeois tendencies. Her husband-to-be is back in America.

In contrast to Vicky, Cristina is passionate, a dreamer, adventurous, impetuous, artistic, unconventional and is not sure what she wants from life and relationships. She knows what she does not want, but she only has the vaguest ideas of what she wants. She has Bohemian tendencies.

In Barcelona the two women fall in with a local artist, Juan Antonio Gonzalo (Javier Bardem), who tries to seduce them both. Vicky naturally dislikes him, but eventually she sleeps with Juan, discovering that she is not as conventional or cautious as she first supposed. She has erotic longings that she has been trying to suppress. Her impeccably bourgeois fiancé then arrives in Barcelona – and she finds herself terribly bored with him, and falling for the exciting Juan.

Cristina also sleeps with Juan, ends up living with him and having a relationship with him. In a nice twist, the artist’s ex-wife shows up (amusingly played by Penelope Cruz) – she is even crazier than her ex-husband – hard-drinking, moody, hysterical, manipulative, suicidal, chain-smoking, she has previously tried to kill Juan, she is generally nuts. In the end, she seduces Vicky and her ex-husband, and the three of them get involved in a love triangle. Eventually, Cristina discovers that she is not as Bohemian as she thought she was, and that the arrangement does not satisfy her.

At the end of the summer, the Vicky and Cristina go back to the US, and nothing has really changed for them. Vicky is now married to her dreary husband, and Cristina still does not know what she wants from life or relationships. Vicky’s husband is an extreme version of Vicky (practical, conventional etc.) and Juan and his ex-wife are extreme versions of Cristina (passionate, unconventional etc.) The two women represent an attempt to find the Golden Mean between these two extremes, but they fail. The message of the film is: there is no solution to the problem of love, or indeed to the problem of life (where people have to try and find a Golden Mean between being bourgeois and being bohemian). However, unlike Allen’s previous films about the hopelessness of love, such as Husbands and Wives, this film is not bleak or depressing, but manages to remain cheerful throughout. It’s as if Allen is saying: “Yeah, love and life are a pretty hopeless business but let’s not get too depressed about it or anything”.