Camden Movies: Vicky Cristina Barcelona | Penelope Cruz

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with DAN CARRIER
Published: 5 February 2009

Penelope Cruz plays the crazy ex-wife in Woody Allen’s latest

Woody’s Catalonian romp has a high cliché content

VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA
Directed by Woody Allen
Certificate 12A

VICKY Cristina Barcelona tells the story of two Americans spending a summer abroad in the heady surrounds of Barcelona.
Vicky is there to study for a masters: it is a three-month break before her imminent betrothal to the world’s most boring schmuck. She is accompanied by her lonely chum Cristina, whose love life, as we discover early on, has been fairly disastrous.
One day they are approached in a restaurant by a man who has spotted them earlier at an art exhibition. He makes a proposal: come for the weekend to Oviedo. I will fly you there, and then I will show you my favourite sculpture, tip wine down your throats and have my way with you.
It starts a relationship between the three which soon becomes four when his crazy ex-wife (big-haired Penelope Cruz) appears. Through the conduit of this tangled mess the larger question – essentially of whether it is possible to have your cake and eat it – is inconsequentially addressed.
A key problems is this romantic comedy is neither very romantic nor funny. And much of the world our hero/heroines inhabit is impossibly perfect, and that means you may well join me in wishing for them to fall on their faces/bump their heads as they enter and exit each scene.
For starters, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) are too pretty. Then you get the fact that Vicky is annoyingly clever, too. She is the sophisticated New Yorker doing a masters in Catalonia’s cultural something or other. Her chum Vicky is more of a free spirit – trying to turn her appreciation for great literature, art, music into a talent of her own (it eventually comes out after lots of touchy feely sessions with her two new sizzling Latino friends in photography).
Thanks be paid that neither are very happy (that would make it too unbearably perfect): Vicky’s rubbish marriage and Cristina’s inability to find her true muse are the flies in the ointment.
This film feels very much like a series of standardised clichés about New Yorkers – hardly surprising considering the director – and then yet more about the Catalans. All concerned are watchable, and Barcelona is as nice a backdrop as any to escape these dark winter months. But back to form for Woody Allen? I’m not convinced.

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