Miss Little Sunshine

Vicky and Cristina are best friends but they couldn’t be more different. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is rational, cautious, reserved, priggish, straight-laced and engaged to be married to the very sensible Doug (Chris Messina). Christina (Scarlett Johansson) is a free spirit, impulsive, adventurous, courageous, brash, passionate, pretentious, naïve and sexually adventurous.

Together on a summer holiday in Barcelona, Spain, they meet the flamboyant painter Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem). He is beguiling and charming, a charismatic rogue, though completely without conceit. The Americans find themselves drawn into a series of amorous entanglements with the Spaniard, complicated by the fact that he is still involved with his tempestuous, mentally unstable ex-wife Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz).

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is drenched in glowing, Mediterranean sunlight and set to passionate Spanish guitars. It is the fourth film since Allen banished himself from his beloved Manhattan for Europe and the film throbs with an erudite, Bohemian energy. The film’s narrator is not a character. He has more in common with the omniscience of a novel. He makes the most of Allen’s sumptuous, snappy script, describing both actions and intent.

Allen has populated his film with beautiful people, though none are more ravishing than Johansson and Cruz. Both women ooze sex, though with Johansson it appears as something she’s cultivated while Cruz seems to come by it from birth.

There’s a lot of quintessential Allen angst here. Vicky Cristina Barcelona’s Juan Antonio echoes so many other Allen characters down through the years. Life, he says, is meaningless. You must seize passion, even — especially — illicit passion whenever you can. The film forces us to ask the question of ourselves, do we embrace narcissism, following pleasure at the expense of responsibility or do we embrace life’s contradictions and disappointments and stick to the choices we’ve made, no matter how much we regret them? Do we want passion and the pain that inevitably comes with it, or security and risk a life of tedium? Is it more courageous, ultimately, to break away or stick around?

Vicky Cristina Barcelona ends exactly as it begins. Despite a moment when it seems the characters will break free of their established routines, each and every one settles back into the habitual practices that make up their lives. Chronic dissatisfaction, one character labels it — you can’t figure out what you want, just what you don’t want. Sometimes we know ourselves and our own hearts least of all.

I can't agree more with what the writer has mentioned, "It ends as exactly as it begins."

Yes, sometimes we even don't know what we really want.

But if I were Vicky, I would definately not choose Juan Antonio since he's too dandy at all. lol

A nicely-shot movie, indeed.

Scarlett becomes sexier.

Vicky's intelligence and poise really impress me.

Cheers, Woody Allen.