Seventh in a series: Post-9/11 Blues, Internet-infected Brave
New World: A revisiting of 2001-10 pop
(and political) culture
Also fits this series:
“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films
*The last entry in my “Summer
Lite” series for this year.
Subsections below:
A fictional distribution-deal meeting
An initial quick summing
The especially Spanish side of the character constellation
Hall’s Vicky as a story linchpin and gauge of the film’s virtues
Cristina as more of a libertine
Clarkson’s Judy, and final notes
[Edits 9/13/14. Edits 9/15/14.]
.
If you followed my account of
how Woody Allen lined up a producing deal
(and distribution deal) for his drama Cassandra’s
Dream (2007) (see this review-part,
in the second subsection, “A project whose money almost wasn’t there”), you
know this deal broke an impasse regarding CD,
and also apparently opened up doors to him for distribution of future works.
His three films through Whatever Works
(2009), which followed Vicky Cristina
Barcelona, would have a distribution deal through the French film-distribution/sales
firm Wild Bunch.
Also, Whatever Works would be lined up with Sony Pictures Classics as that
film’s distributor in the U.S. However the earlier (Wild Bunch) distribution
deal lead to the later (Sony), Allen would be “sitting pretty” in being
distributed by Sony Pictures Classics in the U.S. until today. Of course, one
could argue that his films have tended to be more consistently commercial since
about 2008.
I started watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona (hereafter, VCB)
when I was still dealing with Cassandra’s
Dream, the latter of which I was rather fond of. On first watching—and I
saw VCB, as accidents would have it,
in separated, partial sessions—I wasn’t that bowled over by it. On second
watching—and often Allen films tend to grow on you with repeat viewings—I liked
it better, but I definitely found it to be more shallow and casual than the
preceding film. (On a level, this different quality is obvious, but I’ll
explore further the deeper nature of this.)
Since I first wrote a version of
the preceding paragraph, I’ve seen VCB
about three and a half times, and I would say it is fine for a certain kind of
mood/personality/audience in a way that Cassandra’s
Dream almost seems to require the opposite mood/personality/audience. Once
quickie measure would be to say that CD
may best be watched if you had a cup of coffee first, and won’t be depressed by
a tough look at troubled motivation; and VCB
can be savored if you’re feeling the loosening effects of wine (assuming you
like wine; I don’t, so much).
A fictional distribution-deal meeting
Not that the shallowness of VCB is all a bad thing. Sometimes we
need a mere diversion. But VCB led me
to imagine a long set of “desiderata” given to Allen in the sort of “general
conception” meeting he might have had (not
that this is realistic for him) with his new distribution/producing-money
partners (Allen is present, in this imagined scene, with his longtime casting
agent Juliet Taylor):
We’ll
distribute Cassandra, no problem
[says the head distribution honcho, in neat power suit, but seeming slightly as
if holding his nose a bit at the prospect]. But next we want something sexier,
lighter.
We want a day
at the beach, a vacation [in a friendlier but firm voice, says the
nicely-suited other guy with him]. We want a sunny look, a warm-climate location,
people strolling in summer clothes. The big hook: two American girls in Spain for the
summer, you know?
A smart one and
a wild one [says the first]. We know you, you like philosophy. So one is the
bookish sort. [Woody thinks, remembering his dog-eared copy of The Birth of Tragedy, The Apollonian
one.] Keeps her head, or tries hard to, when the sex shit starts happening. She’s
in Spain to work on her thesis [the honcho stifles a slight laugh, as if he’s
just described a hopelessly quaint foreign-culture practice]. Looks like—you
know, is really pretty with a nice smile and with the right photography, but
looks like a cross between Shelley Duvall
and Penny from Lost in Space.
[Juliet Taylor,
on a laptop, has just Googled someone, shows her to Allen: Rebecca Hall. Allen gives Taylor the thumbs up.]
The other one
is the nut. She follows immediately, genuinely intrigued, when a determined Lothario
propositions them. [Woody: The Dionysian one.] Undeniably sexy. And blonde. Our
deal has this playing on Spanish TV as one of several markets, so we want a
blonde that will have the Latin guys howling at the moon. And full, sensual
lips. She can utter now and then, “I don’t know what I want.” [Woody adds
silently to the line: “But I know what I don’t want.”]
In terms of
looks, give her a sort of unreal, platinum-blonde hair color.
[Allen has
written on his yellow legal pad, “Scarlett. Advise on hair.” This time Taylor,
looking at his note, gives him the
thumbs up.]
And two
Spanish-speaking stars. For the Lothario, Javier Bardem is perfect. Hot right now. Can do “in control, charming,
not overbearing.” And Penélope Cruz.
She’ll play a madwoman who can look great in a photo shoot but also tear it up
with a hissy-cat, rattle-mouth blast of fury.
We’ll have some
Spanish-speaking. You provide English subtitles, and we’ll switch the situation
for the Spanish market. Spanish subtitles for the English talk, and remove the
Spanish subtitles.
You can do a
little of your philosophy—you know, “Life is full of pain,” “Love is
transient,” but keep it limited. Toss it off when you can, with a tedious
voiceover narrator. We want—we want this to be slathered with suntan lotion, a
hazy vacation. Sex, sunny look, and with the hugger-mugger in a bedroom, like
it’s a telenovela at times. Some
mate-switching [Allen is thinking he’ll dive back into the story pools and
atmospheres of A Midsummer Night’s Sex
Comedy and Husbands and Wives]—and
can you do a three-way? [This last said by Mr. Distribution rather low, as if
with some hesitation/caution.] [Allen shrugs, nods.] I mean not graphic, but suggestive enough.
[Woody thinks: A red-lit darkroom scene. And in another incident: Sex on a
kitchen floor, with pot on stove about to boil over.]
We want sexy, sexy, don’t-think-a-lot, but not Jersey
Shore stupid.
Can you
deliver?
Woody delivers.
An initial quick summing
As you might expect, I didn’t
like this film as much as (after I deciphered some of its talk) Cassandra’s Dream. But it undeniably has
its charms and smart elements. According to its Wikipedia article, it won 25
out of 56 nominations for awards. Penélope Cruz won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar (which I more-or-less remember from when
it happened), along with the BAFTA award for best supporting actress. In the
Golden Globes area, Bardem, Hall, and Cruz were nominated for best actor, best
actress, and best supporting actress respectively; none won, but the film won
best film (comedy or musical) in those awards.
Incidentally, as a good measure
of how I took this film, I didn’t laugh out loud much at all, but generally I
found it charming and interesting. I think as a comedy it was on the subtle (and
sometimes wan) side, whereas Whatever
Works (2009), which in most ways is inferior work, made me laugh a lot more
(and when I review the latter, we’ll see why). I think the best way to sum up VCB is to remember the old saying, “Life
is tragic for those who think, and comic for those who feel.” Maybe for
thinkers, VCB is charming
entertainment but not apt to elicit guffaws; but for feelers, maybe they find
it more laugh-out-loud funny.
It seems among the better
offerings of Allen’s late period, but is by no means as great as his best older
work. I found myself slotting it into interpretive categories, in terms of
Allen’s oeuvre. It seems more similar, than to any of Allen’s other films, to Husbands and Wives (1992), in terms of
its multi-level analysis of love and its “nosy look” at shifting erotic
liaisons between people (and its narration element, which viewers might find,
here, a little cumbersome at times); and to A
Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), in terms of its delving into a “love
story” that also relates to sunny
conditions, natural (or “sensuously cultural”) surroundings, and a sort of
almost-mythologizing way of looking at love. The latter aspect includes the
film’s term-paper-like, often narrated talk along the lines of, for
instance, (1) how Vicky is “grounded
and realistic, and understood the beauty of commitment,” and valued her fiancé
because he was decent and professionally well-off, while her best friend
Cristina seems to go through love affairs like a kind of drifter, and as a sort
of principle, she accepted “suffering as a result of deep passion.” (2) There is a reference to Cristina’s
“tragic, romantic, free-thinking view of life,” while she regards American
culture as puritanical and materialistic.
The story-ball really gets
rolling when Juan Antonio Gonzalo (Barden), a bohemian and painter who is known
among locals who schmooze in a reception to have had a messy divorce,
approaches Vicky and Cristina, two twenty-somethings in Spain for a creative
summer (Vicky is doing a thesis on Catalan cultural identity, in which she was
initiated by her admiration for the architect Gaudi and for the painter Joan Miro), while they sit at their table. (By the way,
they are hosted, and housed, in Spain by a friend of Cristina’s family’s, named
Judy, played by Patricia Clarkson.)
Juan Antonio propositions them,
in a suave, patient way—with Vicky, per character, reacting more or less along
the lines of propriety and indignation, and Cristina eventually persuaded to
take him up on his offer to fly them to Oviedo for a weekend of cultural
appreciation and a sexual encounter. If all this sounds rather preposterous
and/or pulpy, I think the proposition scene is one of the best-developed scenes
in the film, and is truly amusing. But some might not like the often
more-short-episode embracing of novelty that follows.
The especially Spanish side of the character constellation
Then, among the three main,
young women of this story, there is Maria Elena, played by Cruz, who is some
kind of artist whose swervings into episodes of acute mental illness have
apparently led to her divorce from Juan Antonio and to her occasional
hospitalization. She is the focus of other concise meditations by the narrator
and in-film characters related to love, such as her view that the only truly
romantic love is the unfulfilled kind. Maria Elena haunts Juan Antonio, and he
refers to her as a kind of touchstone even while serenading these two Americans,
while not trying to approach them merely as abstractions who primarily remind
him of his ex-wife.
Maria Elena in person only
arrives on the scene more than halfway through the film, and of course, Cruz
playing her, speaking in both Spanish and English, cuts an impressive figure.
Slight of build but poised enough when she speaks English, Cruz comes across as
both distinctive in action and able to look sharp as in a photo shoot of her
that (in VCB) takes place at one
point: she seems here like something that an artist working for an ad agency
would ink out, with hair, brows, and eyes all dark, as an “archetypal model-beautiful
Latina.”
I think if you’ve read this far
and you were wondering if you would like this film, you would have decided by
now. The premises aside, the film is charming for its travelogue look at Spain
(Barcelona, Oviedo, and Aviles, per the film’s Wikipedia article), with beautiful
photography of locations both specific (Juan Antonio’s father’s country house,
with an elderly Spanish man playing the father, a poet who refuses to publish
his poems) and more tourist-destination-type (for instance, a majestic building
designed by Gaudi). I forgot to mention that VCB reminds me a lot of Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004), in terms of conveying a sense of sunny climes,
lovelorn and love-besotted traipsing around, and the fun of drinking wine,
etc., so it functions in Allen’s oeuvre somewhat as Sideways does for Payne’s: as a concession to the partiers, the
summer animals, the beer-swilling frat boys and sorority girls, among us (and
hence as a kind of cash cow for the producer/distributor types who want to
balance that, balance-sheet-wise, against the more “acquired-taste” offerings among the auteur's other works).
Also, this film hinges, for its
plot and some of its values, on what some may consider the stereotype of the
Latin lover and the Latin wildwoman (or crazywoman); that said, Bardem and Cruz
give their characters realistic dimensions and shadings, and I understand that
Allen may have hewed to semi-stereotypes to make this film marketable to
American audiences (who might use as “hooks” the more uncomplimentary ways
Bardem’s and Cruz’s characters may be interpreted) and to Spanish-speaking
audiences (for whom these characters would fit more acceptably into a sort of telenovela framework). In any event,
what makes the film work is largely not a sense of stereotyped character; for
Americans, what might make it a little stilted or clunky is that, aside from
its occasionally trite-sounding narration, a sort of schematizing way it has of
piecing out its sub-themes regarding love. (In this latter regard, it may be no
more stultified or schematic than Cassandra’s
Dream is in its cool, more unified way.)
Hall’s Vicky as a story linchpin and gauge of the film’s virtues
One of several measures for me
of this film is how Rebecca Hall does. I think it’s interesting she was
nominated (and didn’t win) as lead actress for one set of awards (Golden
Globes), though Cruz won in her category for two others (Oscars and BAFTA). I
think that overwhelmingly Hall has the bigger role here, in terms of her
percentage of the story and having more emotional notes to hit. But when I
first saw the film, I thought she was uncomfortable in her part, several times.
I thought this was due more to how the role was written (and maybe due to hasty
production) than to how much she could have gotten her acting chops around it.
But as I saw the film again, I felt more that she articulated the role generally
pretty well.
With her authoritative eyes and facial
proportions that are not altogether classically beautiful but still quite attractive,
Hall seems perfect for a serious, brainy grad student. In this regard, she
seems, in Allen’s work, like an heir to Diane Keaton’s capacity when the latter
worked in Allen’s orbit most as an intellectually centered sort, rather than
more of a female stereotype of some sort. Hall also, in VCB, generally handles well the little emotional shifts that are
required by the script’s precise (if occasionally pulpy) moments.
This said, I think where VCB is most apt to “come apart at the
seams” is in Hall’s role as Vicky. And on repeated viewings, though overall I
warmed to Hall’s filling the role, I still felt that Vicky was a puzzling sort.
Granted, she holds the flag for Allen of rationality working valiantly to hold
its own—and the sense of loyalty to a marriage in which a woman has marched
well along into—in the face of the siren call of a sexual entreaty from “an
undeniably tempting man.” What happens next follows the patterns we’ve seen in
Allen elsewhere, the troubles of conscience, the jealousies or other senses of
slight, and so on as a result of “the heart wanting what it wants” and thus its
leading its owner to sexual affairs, dropping one mate for another (even if for
one “crazy” night), etc., etc.
What I found less than
believable was how Vicky would confess some of her confusions—i.e., thoughts
related to being drawn to another male (due to a tryst) while having committed
to another (fiancé Doug [Chris Messina])—to
the likes of Juan Antonio or—even stranger to me—to another male, Ben, whom
she’d just met as a fellow student who in one passing situation “hits on” her.
This even while, quite clearly, she’s generally moving along—and indicating as
much—into the long-term constraints, blessings, and expectations of marriage.
For someone so smart as Vicky—and
not that a smart person can’t have stumbles along the strait-and-narrow path in
this regard, as Allen often depicts—I found it “out of character” that she
could seem like such a wobbly clod in this way--i.e., in her talking about her new developments to newly-men met. As an indication, a sample line
of hers, roughly paraphrased, shows an Allenesque tangle: to Ben, of all
passing liaisons, she remarks on how a new guy she met (Juan Antonio), who
moved her so much, is now attracted to her best friend, even while she, Vicky,
got married (by this point) to the guy she “wanted.” At another point, she says
to Juan Antonio (before her Spain-side marriage to Doug, I think), “We [Juan
Antonio and herself] had this irrational weekend and now I don’t know where I am.”
If Vicky was concerned (as her
expressions of conscience suggest) about her divided loyalties and the like,
why spell such things out to the man (especially the self-assured Juan Antonio,
who in one scene even gives her slightly meddlesome feedback on her fiancé) who
had caused the roiled waters? Why not just primly keep away from him? (Maybe I’m
just old-fashioned.)
But of course, the story, for
its aims of color and variety, needs her thoughts to be revealed—we would get
this via an omniscient narrator relating thoughts in a print potboiler—but Allen has
them come out as I just described. In short, this aspect didn’t sell me
entirely on Vicky; it suggested her weakness, I thought.
Cristina as more of a libertine
As for Cristina (Scarlett Johansson)—whose claim to
fame early in the film is that she had made a 12-minute film, which she
directed and starred in—the way she’s a sort of seeker and artistic wanderer
seemed both credible in its way and beside the point, the latter aspect in that
Vicky’s odyssey is the more important one in this story. But as an element of
the story, Cristina provides the more-empty variety that those seeking mere
titillation would like more. (At one point she says she wants a more “counterintuitive”
love, to which some of us might send her off with a wry, “Have fun!”)
She is the sort of person my
mother would characteristically say “needs a good kick in the ass.”
I won’t talk much about the plot
developments and scenes when Maria Elena is on hand, which overall are more—more
than the more-cerebral Vicky stuff—obvious, slightly sensational, and not
present for depth or after-film adult discussion over dinner or drinks. What
ultimately ends up happening is that, first, there is the relatively “spiritual”
premise to Cristina, Maria Elena, and Juan’s mutual involvement being about
Juan Antonio’s and Marie Elena’s developing Cristina’s artistic side as a
photographer. (Allen in both this film and in Whatever Works notes the superiority, on a level, of an old-fashioned
film camera, not a digital camera—and here I am about as old-fashioned as he is.)
Also, they become a sexual threesome, which includes a red-tinted darkroom
scene as I was not merely joking about in the fictional planning meeting described
above.
Some “mythical” overlay gets put
on this relationship, such as when Maria Elena tells Cristina that she was the
missing ingredient that her, Maria Elena’s, relationship with Juan Antonio
lacked, and now it added a “tint” that “makes the picture beautiful” or such.
This while, in their working lives, Cristina works with her photography, and
Maria Elena, re-installed in Juan Antonio’s household, paints new paintings
with abandon, as does he—all in a sort of grad-student’s (or college student’s)
summer fever dream.
Then, at summer’s end, Cristina
has to leave the Juan Antonio household, and go back home. The narrator has
told us she started having thought supervene over feeling, and…. Her spirit was
crying for leaving, to adapt a Led Zeppelin line. This turn leads Maria Elena
to be furious; “Chronic dissatisfaction, that’s what you are,” she tells her.
(With Cristina gone, the old fight-furies start between Juan Antonio and Maria
Elena, and she dramatically leaves his house, again.)
In yet another novel twist, when
Vicky is with Juan Antonio in yet
another inadvisable move of hers, Maria Elena appears, in a crazy state again,
and accidentally shoots Vicky, who has to explain this development (with a
cover story) to Doug when the married couple is to return to the U.S.
I didn’t spoil this film for
you. A lot of its pleasure is in beholding its developments in sunny scenes and
with pleasant Spanish-guitar music. It’s not very conceptually demanding,
unless you had to relate it to a term paper on love on deadline.
Clarkson’s Judy, and final notes
Patricia Clarkson adds some
adult color as Judy, including in a scene where Vicky catches her having an
adulterous kiss with a man not her husband, and then Judy emotionally confesses
her momentary issue to Vicky. Judy will always remain with her husband, but on
a level the old love has gone.
##
[Added 9/15/14: The cinematographer for VCB was Javier Aguirresarobe, and the European-based production company was Mediapro, which would work with Allen again.]
