Vicky Cristina Barcelona

"Vicky Cristina Barcelona" is yet further proof, if proof were needed, that Woody Allen has no soul. Watch carefully; when he passes mirrors, is there any reflection? Javier Bardem is one of the sexiest men, and best actors, alive. Penelope Cruz's is a living Barbie Doll. How could Allen take these two sexually attractive creatures and build a lifeless, bloodless, dry as dead leaves, utterly boring, inept film around them? How long has Allen been making movies? And yet he commits a cardinal sin that the greenest tyro is warned against: a movie is a *movie*, not a book. Let your movie tell your story. Don't provide voice-over narration. There are exceptions of course; film noir, for stylistic reasons, relies on voice-over narration. But why, in this pathetic, amateurish exercise, is there a nerdy, dispassionate, uninteresting, flat, white male voice horning in on the action, and narrating almost every scene? Two beautiful young American girls get into a taxi cab at a Spanish airport. The narrator, sounding like an antiseptic-soaked cotton swab, there to remove you from any suspension of disbelief, or involvement, you may have been able to conjure up, announces, flatly, "Vicky and Cristina are two beautiful young American girls. They are getting into a taxicab at a Spanish airport," or some such cloddish, invasive, commentary. Did Allen do this because he knows he is too old and too marked by his tabloid love life to appear in his own movies? And, so, rather than having to watch Allen on screen, directing everything, including the viewer's emotional response, with the fury of a puppeteer who doesn't much like or respect his own puppets, but, rather, envies them their youth, beauty, and sex appeal, and so makes them as ridiculous and empty as possible, we have to endure this grating voice of voice-over narration? I mean, really. You're a filmmaker. You are blessed enough to have *Javier Bardem* and *Penelope Cruz* in your movie. What degree of arrogance, of cluelessness, would lead you to believe that the audience needs to be *told*, by this nerdy little American male voice, what Bardem and Cruz are thinking, feeling, doing, when these superb performers are on screen, acting everything out with their top notch talent? Anyway, the plot is a bore, and utterly without insight. The movie is all about screwing and it says nothing new or true about love or people or relationships. The viewer is given nothing to care about, to cry over, even to laugh at. Watch the movie Allen was trying to make, "Jules and Jim."

"Vicky Christina Barcelona" will be praised by the few remaining Woody Allen fans and condemned by the rest of us, whose model for drama is derived from classic Greek theater. The demands for statement of circumstance, a crescendo of conflict rising to a crisis, a resolution of the crisis, and a brief concluding summary are missing from VCB. The convention of character change -- Othello changing into a wife murderer, Hamlet deteriorating into madness, Scout's discovery of important life values in "To Kill a Mockingbird" -- is also missing. The usual expectation that minor characters are introduced into a story if they have some purpose, is ignored. And of course, the common convention of a plot, as opposed to a vignette, is nowhere on the horizon. The extensive use of anonymous voice-over narration does not salvage this wreck and only leaves the audience annoyed and patronized. It is worth speculating that if someone else had proposed to make this same movie, someone previously unknown, it never would have gotten financed. Vicky and Christina are not believable from their first introduction. That the stiff and conservative Vicky would have traveled to a foreign country with the impulsive and directionless Christina to spend two months together is inconceivable. Given that the initial premise fails, the rest is an embarrassing exploration of an old man's fantasy about two young women. At one point Vicky meets a young man in a language class, another possible diversion for her. Although he seems dramatically interesting, he disappears after his one brief scene. His exchange with Vicky adds nothing to her self-awareness or any other aspect of the movie. The scene could have been cut entirely with no consequence except elimination of any expectation in the audience that the young man might have some purpose in the film. When the endless display of self-descriptions by each of the characters becomes tiresome to all, including the characters, we experience a classic "deus ex machina." Maria Elena is dropped into the little that remains and fires off a few sobering rounds. The movie ends pretty much where it began. Vicky is the same Vicky, conservative, now married, willing to make the same compromises she has always made. Christina is still floundering around trying to discover herself. Whose movie was this? Was it Vicky's or Christina's? In the end neither of them holds our interest.