You should hate these people, really, these smug American yuppies chatting gaily about golf, tennis and boating over red wine on a sun-splashed Spanish afternoon.
You’re also free to abhor the painters, poets and musicians who populate Barcelona and spend their bohemian days idly debating the merits of love and art — when they’re not wrapped up in making them both, that is.
Somehow, Woody Allen makes us not just tolerate them but find ourselves engaged in their adventures in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” his strongest film in quite a while. He seems freer here, more comfortable in his rhythm and less anxious to prove himself in a foreign land.
It’s a romantic comedy, yes, in the writer-director’s great tradition of absurdity and longing. It’s an easy European romp, though it’s surely superior to Allen’s recent trilogy of London-based movies, “Match Point,” “Scoop” and “Cassandra’s Dream.”
But it’s also tinged with melancholy, letting us know Allen isn’t just mocking his characters but feeling a certain amount of sympathy for them in their confusion, which inevitably evokes a similar response from his audience.
What’s fascinating is the juxtaposition he’s created here: In obviously stilted, overly literary tones, his narrator describes his characters’ every action and emotion, and yet they themselves consistently act in impulsive, contradictory ways. These are civilized people, behaving badly but played straight by the actors, and that’s the chief source of laughs.
“She was grounded and realistic,” the narrator says of Vicky (Rebecca Hall) as she and her fellow American tourist Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) absent-mindedly gaze out the windows of the cab carrying them from the Barcelona airport toward the summer of exploration that awaits them. The construct would seem pretentious if Allen himself weren’t undermining it at every turn.
Hall and Johansson, Allen’s recent muse, co-star as best friends who couldn’t be more different in terms of their deeds and dreams. Vicky is a practical and structured student pursuing her master’s degree in Catalan culture, and she’s engaged to marry the very proper, dull businessman Doug (Chris Messina). (He’ll arrive in this laid-back city later on in khakis and a button-down. Say no more.) Cristina, meanwhile, is a restless and passionate aspiring photographer who is fresh from a disastrous attempt at making a short film and yet another tumultuous breakup. She has no idea what she wants; she only knows what she doesn’t want.
But both bright young women respond in surprising ways to sexy artist Juan Antonio (an irresistible Javier Bardem), a stranger who invites them to spend the weekend with him. Vicky naturally thinks he’s a Eurotrash cliche and tries to fend him off, but Cristina is intrigued — and who could blame her? How things begin with him, though, aren’t necessarily how they end, which is where much of the fun of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” lies.
And that’s a terrible title, by the way. It’s not even reflective of what the movie’s about, but maybe that’s part of the point: yet another intriguing bait-and-switch.
Because then Penelope Cruz enters the picture, a force of nature as Juan Antonio’s tempestuous ex-wife, Maria Elena. She’s fiery, funny, gorgeous and impossible to stop watching — a genius painter and pianist, if she does say so herself, albeit one who has just tried to kill herself when we first meet her. It may be the best work of Cruz’s hit-and-miss career, rivaling her Academy Award-nominated performance in “Volver” a couple of years ago. But it’s also an intriguing example of an actress who has already established herself fitting into Allen’s familiar banter.
Hall, meanwhile, serves as Allen’s mouthpiece throughout the film. The statuesque British stage actress is all sarcasm and witty one-liners, with a smart, dignified presence reminiscent of Gwyneth Paltrow. Johansson will get all the attention, of course: Those lips! Those eyes! That platinum-blond mess of hair! But “Barcelona” wouldn’t be the same without Vicky or Cristina. Or Juan Antonio. And certainly not Maria Elena.
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