The Mac Weekly

Issue date: 10/3/08 Section: The Arts

Media Credit: www.allmoviephoto.com In Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," three's a crowd, in the best way possible.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the bewitching atmosphere of jam-packed movie theaters. Only one other state of theatrical exhibition compares to the electric tension of being part of that crowd: empty cineplex screening rooms. Let's face it, we've all been there. You loathe the moment that that one person walks into the boxy screening room-and depending on the cineplex, these rooms seem to have somehow retrogressed to take on the appearance of their nickelodeon ancestors-because now you can't, in good confidence, put your feet up on the seat in front of yours.

Someone burst into my private screening room experience of "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" this Sunday. It was halfway into the movie. I kept my feet up anyway, being a college student and a slob.
"Vicky Cristina Barcelona" is one of Woody Allen's latest creative endeavors. At the age of 72, Allen is still experimenting with filmic form (and opera; recently he directed a version of Puccini's "Gianni Schicchi" in Los Angeles). And "Vicky" doesn't mind beating you over the head with its own form of romantic avant-gardeness. Of course it's rather refreshing after Allen's comparatively conservative "Scoop" (2006).

The redundant title of the film reveals its main characters. There's Vicky (Rebecca Hall), there's Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) and there's that more obscure object of desire, Barcelona. Vicky and Cristina are friends spending a few months in Spain together. They meet a sexy Spanish guy named Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) at a bar, and he invites the two of them to partake in a bohemian sex adventure in Oviedo. Love triangles begin, and eventually we meet María Elena (Penélope Cruz), Juan Antonio's neurotic ex-wife.

The film begins with possibly the most obnoxious voice-of-god narrator ever to grace the Grandview's audio system. Allen fully recognizes how irritatingly gratuitous this narrator is. The impression I got was that he employed the narrator to point out how strongly the images he composed on the screen speak for themselves without the need of dialogue or the commentary of an extra-diegetic narrator. I immediately understood that Vicky and Cristina were very different women without being told so, Woody: you split the frame to show both of them, even though they were sitting maybe two feet apart in a taxicab.

Continued...

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