Woody’s World

Also on display, although far more modestly, is a ravishing British actress named Rebecca Hall. She plays Vicky, an American graduate student spending the summer in Spain in pursuit of a master’s degree in “Catalan identity”–which is odd, since she speaks no Spanish and since “Catalan identity” is not the name of a recognized field in which one is awarded a master’s degree.

But then, Vicky is not a resident of the real world. She is a creature in Woody Allen World, a place that only superficially resembles our own. In Woody Allen World, for example, people speak in the overly deliberate manner of characters in a mediocre drawing room comedy.

The ensemble of Vicky Cristina Barcelona discuss death and love and pain and art with a deadly seriousness entirely unleavened by the irony, wit, and humor that made people think, once upon a time, of Woody Allen as a man with something significant to say.

Even omniscient narrators living in Woody Allen World, who might otherwise be expected to have a modest command of the English language, deploy pretentious malapropisms that reveal their creator’s profound intellectual insecurity. Vicky Cristina Barcelona has just such a narrator, given fussy voice by a fussy stage actor with the fussy name of Christopher Evan Welch.

The narrator is also something of a bore (not that Allen knows this) since he keeps describing to us in words exactly what we’re watching. As Vicky and her friend Cristina take photographs around Barcelona, the narrator says, “They spent the day taking pictures in Barcelona.” And with the ham-handed obviousness that, at times, afflicts the old when discussing the actions of the young, he informs us that, for one character, “the thought of them in bed caused her some conflict.”

Listening to narration this dreadful causes me some conflict, too–conflict between my desire to throw things at the screen and my need for the money I will receive for this review.

And yet Vicky Cristina Barcelona is not entirely without interest. For one thing, it is rare to see a work of such profound misogyny. This is a movie about how impossible it is for women to be satisfied, how women do everything in their power to destroy their own happiness and the happiness of others, and how they perpetrate emotional violence on themselves and the men hapless enough to cross their paths. Interesting perspective on the opposite sex from a man who allowed his girlfriend to find nude photographs he had taken of her teenage daughter, his lover.

Vicky, the Catalan identity student, is tightly wound, nasty, and depressed. When Juan Antonio proposes that he, Vicky, and her friend Cristina all go to bed together, Vicky responds with shock, horror, and disgust–which, to be sure, only reveals how desperately she wants it. She is a proper bourgeois, engaged to a businessman who works for a company called Global Enterprises. She thinks she wants stability and certainty; but of course, what she really wants is some romantic guitar playing and an hour in a glen with Juan Antonio.

Cristina is hungering for “something more.” She wants to be an artist but doesn’t know how to express herself (another condition that afflicts Allen women). She is, one character says, chronically dissatisfied. The bourgeois life is not for her, but when she finds herself in the more adventurous ménage à trois situation with Juan Antonio and his ex-wife, Maria Elena, she decides that isn’t for her, either.

The only woman who seems to have any sense of herself is Maria Elena, who is passion personified–which means she is sexually omnivorous, nasty, suicidal, and homicidal. Her spiritual ugliness is captured perfectly by Penélope Cruz in a knockout performance. Of course, since most of the time she is speaking in idiomatic Spanish, I have no idea whether her dialogue is as ludicrous as everyone else’s.

Allen is often praised for the roles he writes for women. It is true that he writes many roles for women, unlike other comic moviemakers. So what if many of them are whores, psychotics, or bipolar lunatics, either sexually withholding or sexually demonic? He gives them a lot of lines, and for actresses, that’s all that matters.

Coming up next from Woody Allen: a movie about a man in his sixties and his obsession with an actress very much like Scarlett Johansson. (Google her name and Allen’s and look at the pictures that come up and you will see image after image of him staring straight at her breasts.)

About this I’m not kidding. Larry David plays the Jewish man in his sixties. That makes sense. Allen’s entire life has become a routine straight out of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.