VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA

Maybe it's because I've travelled. Maybe it's because I wish, sometimes, that I was still travelling. Maybe it's because I've based so much of my current view of the world on the experiences I've had while traveling. It must be a melange of all these things that made me fall in love with this newest number from Mr. Allen of "I married my almost-adopted daughter, had to undergo psychoanalysis and eventually made fun of that in a movie" fame.

Ok, that isn't the only thing that's made the man famous.

Woody Allen has a knack for film like no other I've seen. How is he able to put out movie after movie, year after year, or to have so many of them actually be worth watching? Isn't his eye sight failing? His glasses are huge. And shouldn't his wit be fading? He really has been in psychoanalysis for years; apparently he's an agoraphobe. But I guess these things also add up somehow and make him a filmic genius. I do, though, find myself more likely to enjoy the films in which he doesn't write himself a part. MATCH POINT was a recent delight. And add a tally to the figurative chalkboard with tonight's screening of VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA.

The film, which centers on two friends (Vicky and Cristina) who summer in Barcelona (hence the title) is about the pitfalls and triumphs of both quick and lasting bouts of love. It is about romance when you run with it, and romance when it runs away with you. It is about being young and foreign, and about travel and wanderlust and hesitancy and complacency, and the trouble with it all. And something about these plot threads twining together really sang to me. When the credits rolled, tears sprang from my eyes (Did I just type that? Like a freakin Danielle Steele novel?), and I started clapping. I was *that* girl. The clapping girl. I was crying and laughing and clapping and remembering my 22nd birthday spent on the shores of Barcelona, in love, wildly in love, with Spain, paella and being far away.

But nostalgia was not the only conductor driving my admiration of this movie. Not only is this the first film I've seen in which I actually *kind of* liked Scarlett Johannsen's presence and performance, but it's also the first I've seen featuring Javier Bardem playing a part that seems to resemble his true nature--or what I hope his true nature is--a swarthy, Latin lothario with a penchant for wine, women and not much else. And shall we also mention the feisty Penelope Cruz? I've never been disappointed by Cruz in a film, but man, can she own a scene! Of course, we have to thank our writer for that: he wrote some of the best emotional dialogue for her character, and she held onto it well. It's the "z," I think. That must do it, because Tom Cruise...can't act. Penelope Cruz...can. It's all in the "z."

plot: One man changes love lives.
thought: Or was it the city?
in five: 4.5/5

infatuate yourself: http://www.vickycristina-movie.com/