Word: cristinas
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...still has 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...
...magicians in The Prestige) wrote her master's in Catalan Identity. Before marrying businessman Doug (Chris Messina), she has come to Barcelona to spend July and August with a welcoming relative, Judy (Patricia Clarkson), and Judy's husband Mark (Kevin Dunn). Vicky has brought along her friend Cristina (current Woody muse Scarlett Johansson), who is restless emotionally and artistically. She has the impulse to be creative - she starred in and directed a 12min. film - but not, at least so far as she can locate it, the talent...
...those artists, found mostly in fiction (and in the fantasies of artists), whose true vocation is mixing up the hearts of the many women who fall into his bed. Their avid emotions are the canvas on which he splashes the bright strokes of his evanescent ardor. Cristina, ready for an adventure, lures the painter to her and Vicky's table, and Juan Antonio, ever the gracious roue, proposes that the Americans accompany him to the town of Oviedo. "We'll eat well, we'll drink good wine, we will make love." "Who will make love?" asks Vicky with a schoolmarm...
...Oviedo, Juan Antonio briskly, suavely, steers Cristina to his hotel room. He hardly needs to use all his seductive talents; Cristina is eager for a night with a Latin lover. ("If you don't start undressing me soon," she tells him, "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...
...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...