Always Scarlett

Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the latest Woody Allen movie, opened last Friday, and I went to see it because it stars Scarlett Johansson. What, you think that's not a good enough reason to go see a movie? Well, you're wrong.

VCB tells the story of best friends Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), who go to Barcelona for the summer. There they meet Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) and María Elena (Penélope Cruz), and things become unpredictable.

The movie displays both some excellent qualities and some poor decisions, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. The acting is great, and the four main actors do a terrific job with their characters. The dialogue feels real and flows naturally, in that naturalistic Woody Allen way that makes characters feel like real people instead of fictional entities. The thematic concerns, such as love, dissatisfaction, moral ambiguity, and the question of knowing what you want/thinking you know what you want are very interesting and explored in depth.
On the lackluster side, the photography was bad, with plenty of blurry and out of focus shots that were obviously not meant to be that way. And on a less picky level, the voiceover that narrates the movie struck me as lazy filmmaking. Allen uses this technique to tell us things instead of showing us, and while I understand it keeps the ball rolling and it's even amusing sometimes, the overall feeling I got was one of "I'm telling you this so I don't have to bother wasting time on screen showing you". I think the actors could have conveyed what was being narrated through dialogue and interaction, rendering the voiceover redundant and annoying, a cheap device to help the story move forward.

All in all, and as I said, I enjoyed the film. And yes, had it not starred Scarlett Johansson, I would have liked it a lot less. But she's beautiful and looks phenomenal in this kind of contemporary movie (as opposed to period pieces, in which she doesn't look as great). I don't think I liked it as much as I did Allen's previous Scarlett Johansson movies (Match Point and Scoop), but Bardem's charismatic performance added a lot to this enjoyable film. But, in the end, it doesn't really matter what I say: if you like Woody Allen, you'll go see this movie, and if you don't care for his films, you'll skip it. So there you go: do as you please.