Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

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CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND THE MOVIES

Reviewed by David A. Thomas,
Prof. of Rhetoric, Emeritus, University of Richmond[1]

The Meaning of Life: Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Woody Allen is nothing if not prolific. Since the mid-1960s, his credits include over sixty movies, of which he has starred in and/or directed over forty. The rest were writing credits. Two of his films won Oscars for him: Annie Hall (1978) and Hannah and her Sisters (1987). All told, he has been nominated by the Academy fifteen times through the mid-1990s, and once again in 2006 (for Match Point). His list of other awards occupies several pages, not to mention numerous other awards for his actors. He is the subject of many serious film studies. He is a shoo-in for a Lifetime Achievement Award, if he ever slows down enough to provide a point of closure on his active career.

Now over seventy years old, he keeps churning them out on a year-in, year-out timetable, unfortunately to less favorable and even mediocre notices. Not that critics matter much to him. Their general line is something indulgent like, “This [movie of the year] is not all that bad.” Fans of the early Woody Allen movies have been waiting for years for him to exhibit something of his earlier comedic genius. By and large, his movies all tend to echo the same themes and story lines. Most recently, for variety perhaps, he has set a couple of his stories in London.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is his most recent offering, set in photogenic Spain. The title needs to insert the word “in” before Barcelona to be completely descriptive of the movie. Woody’s trademark Dixieland soundtrack is replaced with lush flamenco guitars. The plot is a modern romance revolving around two rich young New York women on a summer vacation, and their encounters with a bohemian artist and his homicidal ex-wife. Think of something like My Summer Vacation in Spain, featuring a few weeks of a menage a trois. Star power is provided by Spain’s top actors, Javier Bardem (Oscar winning villain from last year’s No Country for Old Men) and Penelope Cruz, who play the artist and his ex-wife. Many movie goers will go just to see them take their turn in a Woody movie. The two young women on a fling, the title namesakes, Vicky and Cristina, are played by Scarlett Johansson (by now a Woody Allen regular) and British actor Rebecca Hall.

You’ve seen this movie before, more or less. It’s about the neurotic insecurities of women and their shaky relationships with shallow, sophisticated men. Vicky, an uptight fiance of a rising businessman (let’s just assume from here on that all the characters in the movie are amply affluent), struggles with just how far she ought to enjoy her last few weeks of singlehood. Her best friend, committed bachelorette Cristina, is struggling to get a firmer grasp on what love is, by trying out the Continental way.

When they encounter a debonair Spanish modern artist, Juan Antonio (Bardem), he immediately makes the two American tourists an offer they cannot refuse, a weekend out of town (together) with him for love making. Vicky hesitates, but Cristina is immediately up for the game. “You have to seduce me first,” she tells him. As if. Thus begins a beautiful romance, sort of. Cristina winds up in bed with food poisoning for a couple of days, so Vicky steps in and tours around with Juan Antonio instead; she also finds herself increasingly interested in testing the sexual possibilities, albeit with more pangs of conscience. She’s engaged, after all. As soon as free-spirited Cristina recovers from her minor ailment, she moves in with the artist to find the answer to her search for real love.

But then, halfway through the movie, enters Juan Antonio’s hysterical ex-wife Maria Elena (Cruz). It seems that in their back story, when she and Juan Antonio separated, Maria Elena stabbed him on her way out the door to her new lover. Now she’s back, and she is Not! Happy! to find this new blonde bimbo in what she considers to be her place beside Juan Antonio, which is to say, in his bed. But things smooth out when Juan Antonio suggests a menage a trois, and the two women submissively decide to go for it. At least until Vicky’s vacation is over.

The more interesting story line, though the dullest, is Vicky’s internal battles with herself over her own quandaries about whether she should go ahead with her wedding plans. Her fiancé pushes the envelope a bit by joining her in Spain for a spontaneous civil wedding then and there, with a promise to also go ahead with their elaborate planned wedding back home. He’s a nice guy, but he lacks Juan Antonio’s suave, artsy cachet. The square fiancé’s main dilemma over their impending marriage is strictly limited to which house they will buy when they get home. Vicky’s trying to reconcile herself to a future lifetime with this bland bore.

The Underlying Values. Woody Allen is an adamant cynic who has publicly worked on his angst and neuroses—not altogether for laughs—for all those creative movie making years. I believe you can find a deeper, more serious treatment of atheism and its ad absurdum logical existential underpinnings in Woody Allen’s movies than you can in best-selling author Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens, after all, spends most of his lecture time puncturing hypocritical Christians, violent Muslims, and the venality of the church. Allen shows you the reality of atheism as it is lived out in one’s everyday life, with no hope of an answer to life’s sufferings. There is even a scene in the movie where Juan Antonio shows Vicky “his favorite sculpture,” a statue of Christ in a chapel. But he appreciates it only for its aesthetics: he is “not religious,” as he explains. Nor is anybody else. Underneath Vicky Cristina Barcelona is Woody Allen’s never-ending indictment of the meaninglessness and vanity of life. As Woody told Newsweek magazine, “At the end of the picture it seems to me that everyone was unhappy.”[2] Nothing is sacred, and no one can be really trusted in or out of marriage. No true satisfaction or fulfillment can be found there, despite the beautiful setting, the beautiful people, and the consequence-free sex. Woody Allen movies are a comic version of Ecclesiastes, without its ennobling final chapter that admonishes us: “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth. . . . .here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil” (12:1, 13-14).