Vicky Cristina Barcelona

The expression “return to form” is not only condescending and reductive (form doesn’t go anywhere, it merely reforms), it becomes truly asinine when applied to a filmmaker’s work. After all, we’re talking about a medium, here, where so much money and compromise get involved that it really is a miracle anybody ever produces anything that pleases them (as attested to by Cristina, whose twelve minute filmic assessment of the vagaries of love is a thorn in her lion’s paw – much like love its slippery self – one of many that nobody will ever relieve her of). So many integers are ready to sink the equation. It is all the more ridiculous when you are a well road-tested artist in your seventies who has to hear that yr new film is a “return to form” or an utter disaster (depending on who you read) every time you release one. That being said, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a rare diamond in the manure-bed of late period Woody Allen. Reminiscent of Two English Girls – one of the very few good late period Truffaut films – Woody’s new comedy is also his only believable tragedy in eons. Though only Vicky’s hand is grazed by a bullet and nobody has to attend any funerals, the climax remains funereal. The world of desire and the world of love are slightly at odds with one another, sure, but they abide by the same thermodynamics. Like Heidegger laid the motherfucker down: we pursue that which most retreats from us (Cristina), or else we shut down and relent (Vicky). One incidental character in the film has the shit locked down, and confirms that this comedy is a tragedy about many microscopic deaths: Bardem’s poet father who, like Antonioni, has given up on a civilization that hasn’t yet learned to live in its love after so many war-ravaged centuries, and thus refuses to publish his acts of love, denying the death drive. As far as real love is concerned, we generally remain American tourists there, like Vicky and Cristina amidst the Gaudí. Woody is a cynic, so the compassion for his archetypes here is as ravishing as the architecture and as blunt as the voice over. If love is what Aristotle said – simply volition – the tragedy is that we keep moving away in order to feed it.