Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Woody Allen’s latest, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is ostensibly the tale of two young American women spending a summer in Barcelona. Vicky, played by Rebecca Hall, is pragmatic and engaged to be married while Scarlett Johansson’s Cristina is something of her opposite: a quixotic searcher who knows only what she does not want. The pair’s meeting with Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), a Spanish painter and seducer, results in a series of situations which throw into relief the tension between freedom and stability at the heart of human endeavour. Allen knows what he is about here, employing Christopher Evan Welch as a comically arid narrator whose commentary is set against the electricity of Allen’s stars and Barcelona’s atmosphere of carnal liberality, ably rendered in the cinematography of Juan Aguirresarobe. The result is a simultaneously farcical and sympathetic portrait of the ecstasies and perils of being seriously romantic in the twenty-first century. [Tyler Parks]