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Dir. Woody Allen

Rating: 4.2  |  0 User Reviews  |  Send to Friend

By Piers Marchant

So how does one succeed in making an incredible cast, a stunning, sun-splashed European backdrop, and -- for Christ's sake! -- a make-out session between Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson into a tedious bore? For answers, we have to go to the venerable Mr. Allen, who keeps churning out film after film written in a sort of Woody short-hand. He doesn't write characters anymore, just Woody Allen types of characters, a cliché unto themselves. Two young women, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Christina (Johansson), travel to Barcelona for a summer. Vicky, practical and erudite -- she's in Spain to continue her Master's in Catalan Studies -- is engaged to a nice, boring young man (Chris Messina) back in New York; Christina, far more adventurous and yearning, is in search of her own vaguely philosophical pursuits. One night at dinner, they are approached by a swarthy artist, Juan Antonio (Javier Bordem), who proposes to take them away for a weekend to his hometown, where, he hopes, he will get to "make love" with both of them. Throw into this dubious mix Juan Antonio's ferocious, passionate ex-wife (Cruz), and Vicky's fiancée deciding to come visit his future wife, and you get the general idea. Not that the film is a French-style sex farce. Far from it. Instead, Allen has concocted yet another mish-mash of characters all espousing his usual central themes: love, fidelity, the defining for oneself of happiness. There are also many of the standard Allen cliches, including awkward, post-coital conversations where the protagonists are wrapped up in bedsheets; dollops of intellectual academia-speak ("turgid categorical imperatives"); and numerous infidelities between young and old alike. It's all been done -- by him -- many, many times before, and, if insisting on having twenty-something characters constantly referring to sex as "making love" is any indication, it's as if he's not just lost touch, but also any interest. Indeed, watching an Allen movie now is like listening to an old relative regale you with a story you've already heard a 100x before.

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