Philadelphia Weekly

The preplexingly titled Vicky Cristina Barcelona is Woody Allen's best film in years. Talk about damning with faint praise.

Like tax season and shitty weather, Allen's lackadaisical late-period movies arrive with glum regularity and a resigned sigh. At this point it's hard to even remember that faraway era of classics, but the workaholic Woodman is still grinding out a new flick every 10 months or so whether the scripts are ready or not. These days when he's stuck, he'll just recycle--stripmining Crimes and Misdemeanors for Match Point, and then again for January's Cassandra's Dream.

So it comes as a surprise that Vicky is such a pleasant little trifle. Sure it's problematic and sloppy, but graded on the steep curve one must apply to recent Woody Allen movies, this probably his most agreeable effort since 1999's loopy La Strada remake Sweet and Lowdown.

Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson star as Vicky and Cristina, two young American postgrads spending a summer in Spain. Like most of Allen's female characters, they're lovely little abstractions. Vicky's the sharp, no-nonsense brunette, engaged to a dullard Manhattan businessman (Chris Messina) while working on a thesis about Catalan identity. Cristina is the reckless, sensual blond hungry for art and experience but desperately seeking some sort of direction in life.

This is Allen's third film with Scarlett Johansson, and obviously he's got a thing for photographing those pneumatic lips, but he also finally seems to have figured out how to use her. Too often forced to play headstrong roles for which she's ill-equipped, there's still something vague and unformed about Johansson as a performer--a yearning that suits the blank-slate Cristina to a T.

Enter Javier Bardem's Juan Antonio, a free-spirited Latin-lover stereotype who'd be risible if played by any other actor. Apparently exorcising all the demons summoned by his already legendary turn as that tightly coiled angel of death in No Country for Old Men, Bardem delivers his loosest performance yet, embracing the role's mildewed cliches with a wink and a smile. He first meets Vicky and Cristina at a crowded restaurant, where he promptly suggests a threesome without a trace of lasciviousness, just a happy-go-lucky twinkle in his eyes.

Romantic entanglements and distanglements ensue, complicated by stomach ulcers, sapphic crushes and ill-advised rushes to the altar. The biggest stumbling block, however, is Juan Antonio's ex-wife, Maria Elena, a shrieking emotional banshee played with manic gusto by Penelope Cruz. She's so erratic, she casually admits to plotting Johansson's murder before making out with her a few days later.

There's something charmingly retro about this lusty travelogue, and it's adorable (if frustrating) how sheepish Allen becomes whenever it's time for some girl-on-girl action. The direction, with a generous assist from cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, is perkier and more alert than Allen's recent standard. He even moves the camera once in a while, soaking up the beautiful Barcelona scenery when not gazing adoringly on his impossibly attractive cast.

But even in such a happy, horny piece of work, Allen's trademark pessimism can't help but mope its way through. Patricia Clarkson turns up as a sad-eyed rich woman trapped in a loveless marriage, her subplot a dark vision of Hall's Upper West Side future. Yet all the passionate arguments for following your bliss are upended in the movie's parallel story track, in which even free-spirited Bohemians in untraditional threeways eventually get bored and move on. Leave it to Allen to make a depressing sex fantasy.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona never gets particularly close to its characters. As is often the case with Allen's latest pictures, the people feel more like writerly concepts than actual individuals. But this time around Allen employs a third-person narration, read by actor Christopher Evan Welch, which comments dispassionately upon the action and handles all the exposition he would've otherwise awkwardly shoved into the actors' mouths.

Yes, it's an obvious shortcut, but it's one that allows us to view these folks with the same clinical, curious distance as their aloof author, and it makes Vicky Cristina Barcelona go down a lot smoother than Allen's recent work.

Hardly a return to form, but it'll do.