BlissAndConversation.com

         Woody Allen strikes mellow gold for the first time in a long time with a script that slashes comic irony with recognizable passion.

          Maybe it’s that Spanish sun, those Latin lovers whose fights have more life than other couples’ loves or that long-legged American girl captured intuitively by half-American British actress Rebecca Hall as Vicky.

          Vicky is the movie’s heart.  She’s a serious scholarly girl who has come to Barcelona to work on a thesis on Catalan Identity, despite the fact that she doesn’t know Spanish any better than she knows herself.  With her is her best friend, budding filmmaker Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), blonde, luscious, passionate and non-committal.  Vicky is into commitment, leaving a lawyer fiancé, Doug, tucked away at home who also wants commitment and is already babbling about houses non-stop on their cell phones.  Doug is a walking embodiment of all the conventional clichés attributed to yuppies.  Too bad actor Chris Messina and writer/director Allen don’t turn over a spade or two of the comic surface.

          Javier Bardem does that superbly as artist Juan Antonio, the soul of Spain in a splendid body.  Though we wonder where he gets that expensive red sports car and a private plane, Bardem never overplays the playboy, the Latin lover or the Bohemian artist.  His artistic technique may be inspired by his ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz), as she claims, but his sensitivity and eye are all his own.  He turns them on himself as acutely as on every beautiful woman he meets.

          Though he agrees with Vicky that he may have more in common with artistic hedonist Cristina, it’s Vicky with her serious probing of the Catalan soul who is, au fond, his soul mate.

          The American women meet their match in the dazzling and passionate Maria Elena who, though more than a little mad, may be the truest artist in the film.  The scenes between those two fiery Spanish actors, Cruz and Bardem, are the movie’s highlights.

          All three women are true to their natures as they swing around Juan Antonio like ribbons around a maypole.  But it’s Vicky who grows, who confronts sublimated facets of herself that she will carry back to the programmed life she planned, a life she may find she has already left behind.

By Laura Hitchcock