Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona'

Up against Aphrodite

ROBERT ZALLER

A few years ago, Woody Allen put out a film entitled Mighty Aphrodite. It wasn’t his best, but the title might stand as an epitome of his career. Apart from his early slapstick films, the occasional caper flick, and the Bergman-style Interiors, Allen’s abiding obsession, in life and in art, has been with the power of Eros in human affairs.

Eros is not love. The Greeks would have been appalled by the poverty of our modern language, which has only a single, all-purpose word for the limitless occasion and variety of the affectional, sexual and passionate tides that sweep and determine our lives. For us, “love” is the ultimate act of consumer choice. We concede, at most, that it may not be entirely volitional, as in the trite and misleading phrase, “falling in love.”

The Greeks understood that Eros was the darkest and most mysterious force in nature; the great philosopher Empedocles saw in it the force that held the cosmos itself together, thus anticipating Newtonian gravity by 2,000 years (unless one wants to regard Newton’s theory as a vulgarization of Empedocles).

Woody Allen is not a great philosopher, but he is perhaps the next best thing: a wise comedian. In his Manhattan comedies, the satire of Upper West Side types was always propelled by sexual tumult; and now, in the semi-exile of his most recent films, he has taken up the perennial theme of American innocents abroad, who, as Henry James taught us, are Aphrodite’s favorite pawns.

Allen’s films themselves have been notably uneven in recent years, and for a while he seemed merely passé. But with Match Point he commanded attention again, and now, in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, his latest, he is back in prime form.

Scarlett gets the close-ups

Vicky (the willowy and superbly talented Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson, who appears to be Allen’s muse du jour— she gets some of the most shamelessly adoring close-ups since Bertolucci’s Stolen Beauty) play a pair of American girls summering in Barcelona. Vicky, who’s engaged to Doug (Chris Mussina), is pursuing Catalan studies, no doubt an actual academic category. She has a yen for Spanish guitar, though, as well as doubts she hasn’t confessed to herself about her well-planned life.

Cristina is a free spirit who is looking frankly for romance, which she has an easier time finding than keeping. Both girls are simultaneously wooed by a local painter, Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), who invites them for a weekend. Complications ensue, and Vicky finds herself being seduced instead of the more available Cristina.

We discover the reason for Juan Antonio’s penchant for threesomes in his fiery ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz), whom he can neither live with nor without. When Maria Elena turns up on his doorstep after a suicide attempt, Cristina (soon the lover of both) provides both the buffer and the link that enables their relationship to work.

Europeans understand it better

For a while, this improbable ménage a trois works beautifully and, well, Continentally, for Europeans understand that love and domesticity are not easily reconciled, and may require unorthodox arrangements. For Cristina, though, domesticity of any kind is a straitjacket, and she soon slips out.

Vicky, meanwhile, has been spoiled for good by her Latin lover. When her dorky fiancé Doug shows up to marry her, however, she hasn’t enough nerve to reject him, while Juan Antonio, though temporarily at loose ends, is wise enough to know that he can’t handle a Puritan.

This doesn’t seem a satisfactory resolution to a comedy, but, then, Woody Allen at his best has always been a maker of anti-comedies. The distinction is crucial. In a comedy, all ends well, and lovers in particular are reconciled (or switched, if need be). In anti-comedy, the point is precisely that life goes messily on, and that no one should expect to live happily ever after for long.

A light touch for serious matters

The culprit is Aphrodite herself, that mischievous current of erotic energy in all of us that keeps rewiring itself and reinventing us. Vicky resists it and Cristina submits to it, but both pay an equal if different price. That is why the Greeks thought of Eros as a goddess rather than, as we tend to, a problem in psychic engineering. With Aphrodite, you just can’t win; but neither can you stop playing. The name of the game, after all, is life.

You need a light touch for such serious matters, and Allen displays it here. His camera enables us to enjoy the scenery without lingering on it excessively; his compositional angles are deft but unobtrusive; his satirical eye can be fond (Juan Antonio’s horny father) or piercing (clueless Doug, the epitome of the American loser). The performers are uniformly excellent, and Javier Bardem makes a shrewd career move in rebounding from the stone killer of No Country for Old Men.

As for Allen himself, expatriation has been a good thing. Unlike Roman Polanski, he has no unexecuted 30-year-old warrants waiting for him in the States, but the embarrassments of his own love life have been enough to keep him away from the Upper West Side. He has kept, essentially, the same cast of characters; but transplanted to fresh soil, they have taken on new life. His faults and limitations are well known, but he’s the closest thing to a Joseph von Sternberg we have. And who would have thought that America could produce a genuine student of manners?