Vicki Cristina Barcelona

Too amused and clever to be charming, but also too charming to be refused. Which is why I'm not sure what to make of it. The plot is selective and strange in the way that new experiences always are to the young, impressionable, and sympathetic mind. But as the work of a mature artist, Vicki Cristina Barcelona privileges and repeats tropes and arguments barely credible in the native, bohemian discourse of the innocents abroad and manifestly intolerable when uprooted and miniaturized by the wandering Jew. Perhaps Woody Allen uses the pose of the pseudo-expatriate in order to clown the American tourist back into self-respecting cynicism, but I doubt it: too much of the film shares the girls' perspectives rather than complicates or comments on them. It seems to seduce itself, fall in love with itself, and then, inevitably, tire of itself. Rather than fashioning an ironic trap out of the idealistic debris generously donated by Cristina and Juan Antonio, and eventually even practical, puritanical Vicki, Allen seems to swoon at its unraveling, as though he were filming a red giant star shedding its outer gases into gossamer space, or, more likely, the loveliness of clothing spun and discarded from the body. What I expected to be awkward and frail appeared luminous and confident, which is beautiful, of course, but the revealed nakedness failed to convince me that it was anything but an old man's wishful thinking about romance. Maybe I'm wrong.

Nevertheless, it has charm and intoxicates the senses. Any time attractive young women and men impetuously fly through a storm to Asturias in order to drink wine, eat food, meet poet-fathers, and make love on the grass after guitar concerts, the mind and body will become drunk. And any time any of it happens in Barcelona. . .

Well, add Gaudi to any situation, even if he's tiny and way in the background, and everything goes magic. So although I have misgivings about it, the movie works well enough to look good, and what's film anyway but something to looked at. Cynical or naive, ironic or sentimental, a good summer story is nothing to mock at, even if the total value of the thing increases when the first two of three words are removed from its title.