Foreign Affairs
by Les Phillips

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a film about the chaos and danger of passion, but delivered in a familiarly stylized, Woody Allen package. This is a comedy, with a narrator who provides a moral and narrative center; a structure and tone that's closer to Hannah and Her Sisters or the early, funny films than it is to, say, Husbands and Wives or Match Point. The setting is Barcelona, but the Americans living and visiting there are Allen's New Yorkers, talking and talking about their romantic lives, distancing themselves and us from real emotion with irony and one-liners.

Except when they don't. Few Allen films show as much true romantic pain. Rebecca Hall plays Vicky, who's headed for a tidy marriage but discovers that her emotions aren't so tidy. Scarlet Johansson is Cristina, who doesn't know what she wants when she comes to Barcelona, and knows even less when she leaves. Javier Bardem is the uncertain object of desire, a sexual adventurer who becomes the victim of his own adventures. Johansson is convincing; Hall is transcendent, her face a revelation. Patricia Clarkson is their older, uncertain, ultimately incompetent mentor; she's very good. There's tension througout between the rather raw emotional content and a sort of bourgeois equilibrium (shared by the director's style and the characters' instincts). One powerful, violent scene breaks through the facade, and it is masterfully acted and directed.

I've never had much use for Penelope Cruz, until now. Her character is introduced as a crazy woman she seems merely passionate. Then she seems qutie sensible and then, toward the end, she really is crazy. And she's commanding throughout; she steals the picture.

Wonderful music, as always with Allen; Spanish guitar, this time.

Andrew Sarris has compared Vicky Cristina Barcelona to Annie Hall and Manhattan. Sorry, Andrew; I love and admire you, but, no. Still it's serious, successful work; and if it's mostly too glib by half, the film takes some real risks. Mazel tov, Woody.

*

The Moderns (1988). Critical response to Alan Rudolph's movies is usually mixed, at best; but I always enjoy his films. I have a weakness for decoration and composition. I'm happy watching even the worst Merchant-Ivory film, and I'm a sucker for any director who can frame landscape or streetscape ingeniously. Rudolph is both a film director and a painter, and The Moderns is gorgeous. Like Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (a much better film), it captures time and place brilliantly; it also captures a lovely melancholy. Rudolph specializes in sweetly depressed, broken artists. If that's not your thing, best to stay away from The Moderns; me, I found it exhilarating.

The story: Nick (Keith Carradine) is an American expatriate painter who moons after his ex-wife Rachel (Linda Fiorentino), and is taken up with an evil capitalist (John Lone). Nick hangs out in cafes with Ernest Hemingway and gets dissed at Gertrude Stein's. He's also drawn into an art-forgery scheme concocted by a dubious art patroness, Nathalie de Ville (Geraldine Chaplin). The plot is hokey and a little drab, apart from a few grand confrontations. The acting is uneven. Keith Carradine isn't a strong enough actor to carry a picture; John Lone performs a strange capitalist-pig caricature. And Wallace Shawn is more atrocious than usual as a weird American journalist. I am not very much interested in cross-dressing, and I am especially not interested in seeing Wallace Shawn in women's clothing. I hope you're not, either.

So why see The Moderns? Carradine and Fiorentino have authentic romantic chemistry. Chaplin (a Rudolph regular) and Genevieve Bujold give sensitive, nuanced performances. The music is excellent -- cool Twenties jazz and contemporary classical music, Debussy or Satie or something like them.

And, well, dammit, it's set in Paris. And it looks beautiful.

©2008 Les Phillips
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