Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” has a natural, flowing vitality to it, a sun-drenched splendor that never falters. Two young American women go to Barcelona for the summer—Vicky (Rebecca Hall), who is bright, skeptical, and cautious, and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), more adventurous than her friend but unformed and easily dissatisfied, a seeker without a lodestar. In the magnificent city, they meet Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), who is incapable of spending a night alone. Bardem’s natural-born lover—a painter, by trade—is as devastating as his natural-born killer in “No Country for Old Men.” He’s almost criminally attractive—soft-spoken and erudite, decent in his way but relentless, a Don Juan brought back to life as an English-speaking charmer. Both women get involved with him, and the movie becomes a complicated triangle that forms, breaks apart, and reforms; it’s also a lengthy exploration of the eternal struggle between security and passion, dependency and anarchic freedom. Allen can be literal-minded about his thematic polarities, but, in this movie, he has put actors with first-class temperament on the screen, and his writing is both crisp and ambivalent: he works everything out with a stringent thoroughness that still allows room for surprise. And, through all the twists and turns, the ochre beauty of Barcelona (as photographed by Javier Aguirresarobe) plays a major role. The characters make maybe one or two more touristic stops than is necessary, but it’s a minor flaw. You can feel Allen’s excitement in the sensual atmosphere. Spain! A seventy-two-year-old man has warmed his bones.
Allen uses a narrator (Christopher Evan Welch) to explain who the women are, and, at first, it seems as if the director is just filling in backstory and telling us things we might have noticed ourselves. But this narrator does for Allen what narrators once did for Truffaut—he allows him to skip merely functional exposition and jump from highlight to highlight. Cristina first eyes Juan Antonio in an art gallery. Later, she is sitting with Vicky in a restaurant, and the artist, dining in the same place, comes over and suggests, with virtually no preliminaries, that the three fly to a small city not far from Barcelona for a weekend of sex. “Life is short, dull, full of pain,” he says. Why not seize any opportunity for pleasure? He’s provocatively teasing the Americans, but he’s neither a cynic nor a user. He gives good value; that’s why he’s a heartbreaker. Vicky, who appears to be composed of nothing but common sense, falls in love after one night, and realizes that her fiancé, a New York corporate lawyer whose horizons don’t expand beyond business, golf, and a nice house in Westchester, will never excite her in the same way. But Cristina is the one better suited for Juan Antonio, and she enters into a prolonged affair.
The way the women play against Bardem is fascinating. Rebecca Hall, a twenty-six-year-old English actress from a theatrical family (her father is the director Peter Hall), is tall, with a long face and a wide smile—she can look radiant one minute and neurotic, tense, and gloomy the next, as if she were channelling Allen’s stumbling anxieties (a common reaction in actors working with him for the first time). With Bardem, Hall goes back and forth between desire and panic, and she’s touching as none of Allen’s other female characters have been recently. Scarlett Johansson, who is still only twenty-three, has appeared in an amazing number of movies. There’s no mystery why: she’s charming and also pliant and openly sexual in a way that obviously pleases male directors. She’s at a stage in which her sensuality is more developed than anything else in her personality, but that configuration works for her this time. Going to bed with an attractive man is not going to tell Cristina all that she needs to know about herself. Allen has successfully captured a spirit of restless indeterminacy. Does Cristina have any artistic gifts? Before the summer is over, she begins to stir.
The movie is largely set among artists, in a kind of restaurant-and-studio bohemia (still a possible way of life in Barcelona, perhaps). What happens in this world when you have more promise than you can fulfill is made evident, with tragicomic results, by the figure of Juan Antonio’s former wife, Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz), who is highly intelligent and talented but so tempestuous that she creates havoc wherever she goes. (She’s like a Frida Kahlo without the discipline to work.) The American women yearn for something more than bourgeois stability, yet Allen means for us to understand that a life of passion alone can lead to craziness. Maria Elena is an enactor of her own unhappiness; she makes accusations, steps across sexual boundaries, pulls out knives and guns. Cruz has never done anything like this: with her downturned mouth and wild black hair, she looks witchy and unbeautiful. For Vicky and Cristina, the divorced couple are a vision of Heaven and Hell at the same time. Juan Antonio and Maria Elena can’t get along, but their rebarbative effect on each other produces some good paintings. Is the art that emerges worth all the mess? The answer Allen offers is a tentative yes. One is meant to emerge from “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” believing that happiness may be elusive, even impossible, but that life has a richness greater than one’s personal satisfaction. There’s something stronger in the air—a largeness of spirit, as well as abundant physical beauty. The characters may suffer, but the filmmaker exults.
Academic fictions used to be funny (think of novels by Kingsley Amis, Randall Jarrell, David Lodge). A professor gives himself over to some lofty and exacting pursuit, and yet his life, like everyone else’s, is marked by squabbles, misdemeanors, accidents, and sexual torment, and that discrepancy is ready-made for irony and pratfalls. But now, in the movies at least, the banana peels have been swept away, and the academic setting has yielded one melancholy tale after another. Intellectual passions have hardened (in many cases) into arid rectitude; autumnal emotions such as sarcastic rage dominate the dinner table; and, in the future, the terminating scythe awaits. The positive side of the shift is that these roles bring out the toughness of aging hides. Of all the good actors who have adorned the middle-aged-professor films, including Michael Douglas (“The Wonder Boys”), Anthony Hopkins (“The Human Stain”), Jeff Daniels (“The Squid and the Whale”), Frank Langella (“Starting Out in the Evening”), Philip Seymour Hoffman (“The Savages”), Dennis Quaid (“Smart People”), and Richard Jenkins (“The Visitors”), Ben Kingsley, in “Elegy,” based on Philip Roth’s 2001 novel “The Dying Animal,” is the most formidable and convincing. Kingsley’s David Kepesh is a literature professor at Columbia and a regular virtuoso performer on public television and NPR. Kingsley brings to this role an uncanny stillness and concentration; he hesitates an instant before he speaks, and then jumps ahead to the next place in David’s thought. Unlike some of the earlier professor heroes, he’s never obvious, pedantic, or dry. Nicholas Meyer did the adaptation, and he gets some of the Rothian tone—the impatience, the sharpness, the full-bore egotism that modulates into rueful self-recognition. Kingsley, who is sixty-four, has the grizzled barrel chest of an aging sexual warrior, a strong nose, and a shaved head. He’s shrewd enough to make David not a monster but a plausibly selfish man, a man who has narrowed life down to his own needs and pleasures. He will not be imposed upon.
At the end of the semester, he seduces a graduate student, Consuela (Penélope Cruz, again), who’s meant to be in her late twenties (Cruz is actually thirty-four). In the book, Consuela is only twenty-four, so the scandalous element has been lessened, though the David of the movie still feels it—the difference in years is part of the excitement of the affair for him. An upper-middle-class woman of Cuban descent, slightly formal in her manner, Consuela wants an opening to culture, the touch of an experienced man. David wants a final mad immersion in lust, which arrives, not to his surprise, with its attendant idiocies of jealousy and possessiveness. The Roth novel, written in the first person, has a rushing intensity, but the movie, which observes the characters from outside (with some voice-over narration from David), is calmer and quieter. The Spanish director Isabel Coixet works with candor, directness, and simplicity. She isn’t afraid of lengthy scenes of the two actors just talking to each other, mixed with lavish but respectful attention to Cruz’s body, especially her bare chest, which is treated as one of the wonders of all creation.
We’re in fast company here, and the experience is refreshing. The interludes with David’s friends—including a smart businesswoman who is his longtime occasional lover (Patricia Clarkson) and a teasingly affectionate and possibly envious New York poet (Dennis Hopper)—are written and played with real bite, and David’s relationship with his resentful grownup son (Peter Sarsgaard) is an angry contest of hurt feelings that turns, at last, into wary respect. As much as David would prefer that everything remain the same, mortality and ill fortune abruptly enter his life. The banana peels have been replaced with something like inevitability. As in most of these films, the proud man, getting older, moves away from isolation—a little. That’s as close to an emotional surge as these morose movies can achieve, but, in the hands of a great actor, it’s enough. ♦