VICKY CHRISTINA BARCELONA

dMYD DVD
Starring Penelope Cruz, Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, and Javier Bardem
Trailer

Y

Sit down and glaze, tilt your head to the side, feel your right palm drowning in that jar of mild salsa, your jeans moving slowly off the leather in a gravity-indulgent trip to the floor. Open your mouth a bit, lower your lids. Nobody can see, and if they could… well, they might forgive you. Relax. It’s time to watch a pretty load of nothing.
Film as landscape painting, the simplicity of Vicky Christina Barcelona is sat there in the title, beckoning you forward with a stylish DVD case and a bottle of cheap red. It’s an easy ride for the dumbest senses, your eyes lazily following Scarlett Johansson as she runs across the grass, heart beating slightly out of step as Javier Bardem pops on his nerd-glasses and eviscerates himself on canvas. The languid vistas and dappling shadows of Barcelona ebb in and out of shot as the mannequin stunners traipse across bohemian idylls; the galleries, the streets, the fields, the poetry vineyard and the view from the top of the world, all lit in the same soft warmth of terracotta and sunlight. Spanish guitar hovers around the corners of every scene, framing everything in an easy fantasy world, a film as aesthetic pleasure, something beautiful to run in the background and enjoy as you start to drift away…
Actually no, of course not. It’s a Woody Allen film. Turn the volume up and the gentle pastels on the screen schism and slide into two separate portraits, a gulf between what you hear and what you see on the celluloid. Listen to the words whilst staring at the lips. This is Allen filtered through some of the most beautiful people alive, the director choosing his place and actors for maximum discomfort, a surreptitious contrast between perfection and perception. Essentially four essays on the facsimiles of love and art, creepy uncle Woody picks up some of the most attractive mouths in the world and uses them to deliver a deliberation and observation of their confused attempts at lust, creation and meaning. Each character compulsively lies to themselves on the subjects that keep them alive, brief moments of happiness and assurance overridden by time marching on, twisting relationships and dissolving constructs to create a sense of dull chaos pervading humanity’s lack of meaning. The assured Spanish ‘artists’ have the most to lose, but it’s Johansson’s character that elicits the most sympathy; a girl searching for something that doesn’t exist, but something that she couldn’t understand if it did, living a fiction. The neurotic world-hater mercilessly piles on the juxtapositions between vision, narration and cold-hard emptiness, culminating in a final shot of emotionally-unknowing lost folk so sad it’d make The Graduate cry. One of the world’s most cynical men delivering a sermon through four of the world’s most beautiful people, it’s an odd experience that leaves you dissatisfied with everything and contemplating inserting a biro into your head. But it is very, very pretty.