Word: allen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Well, why shouldn't Allen have a crush on Juan Antonio? For one thing, he dreamed the character up; for another, Bardem doesn't have to work hard to radiate the sensitive machismo of a man who doesn't use women so much as he allows them to briefly fulfill their dreams in him. Visually, too, the movie is in love with Barcelona, its gnarled Gaudi buildings, and with the countryside of Ovieto, a hundred shades of glorious earth tones. (The cinematographer is Javier Aguirresarobe, who has shot films directed by Pedro Almodovar, Victor Erice and Alejandro Amendabar...
...loyal admirers in Europe, though, as was proved by the urgent mob waiting to see Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and by the warm applause when it ended. After the screening we ran into one of his champions: Michel Ciment, the doyen of French critics. "You still go to Woody Allen films?" asked Michel in mock or mocking surprise. He was just setting us up for a pronouncement: that whatever Allen's current reputation, years from now people will take a retrospective look at the 40 - some films he's made and proclaim him as part of a holy trinity of movie...
...Well, maybe not in that empyrean, but arguably in the ballpark. It's hard not to feel warmly toward Allen after VCB, his first vital movie since Match Point three years ago (we quickly throw the veil of oblivion over Scoop and Cassandra's Dream), and maybe his most engaging large-scale effort since, let's say, Crimes and Misdemeanors nearly 20 years ago. It doesn't percolate with the inventive comic situations or quotable one-liners of the films that established his meta-movie credentials, Annie Hall and Manhattan; but, like them, this one is about people whose jobs...
...this is going to turn into a panel discussion.") But a bout of stomach poisoning breaks Cristina's mood, and she must convalesce the rest of the weekend. That leaves Juan Antonio with the disapproving, and spoken-for, Vicky. She is one of those females, rife in the Allen canon, whose insecurity is expressed as hostility to men; she castrates, or at least circumcises, them with every cutting word. And Hall, with her flawless American accent, is equally persuasive at inhabiting, not just miming, the stammering tenseness of the traditional Allen heroine...
...less than Henry James, Allen is judgmental of Americans abroad - they betray a sexual naivete when exposed to a society so much more practiced in the art of gracious loving. And no less than Vicky and Cristina, Allen is almost star struck by the Spaniards, and the Mediterranean ease in forming, then releasing, sexual liaisons. The hallmark of his characters is the fumbling confession of furtive love; but in this idealized Catalonia, where nothing romantic is forbidden, everything is beautiful, as natural as breathing in sync with the woman who has fallen asleep in your arms...