Vicky Christina Barcelona

Vicky Christina Barcelona is the first Woody Allen movie I’ve ever seen. What I saw here makes me want to see more by him. The movie, written and directed by Woody Allen, is about two American tourists to Barcelona, Vicky and Christina. They both have very different views of love, Vicky seeing love as stability, Christina preferring a wild, passionate definition of love. The two encounter Juan Antonio in Barcelona, who shows them that they may both be wrong about what they think of as love.

The movie appealed to me in more ways than one. I have never had a personal definition of love for myself. I believe that I feel it for H, yet I could never define what it is that I feel. I’m not that kind of person. So a movie about defining what love is, makes me think. Christina, played by Scarlet Johannson, says it best early in the movie, describing a student film that she made. “It’s about why love is hard to define.” And I think the movie answer that question. The final answer to why love is hard to define is that love is indefinable; that it is different for every person. What Vicky thinks is love for her, really ends with unhappiness, and what Christina thought was the perfect man and woman for her, ended up being not enough. Every person has their own form of love, like Javier Bardem’s Juan Antonio and Penelope Cruz’ Maria Elena, whose love can never work without a third person. We all have a different kind of love that we need, yet we can never choose what that love is. We are born with it, unchangeable.

Sorry to ramble there, obviously the movie made me think about life and love, and that’s what the movie does best. It makes the viewer really think about things. Someone could watch it and not think at all and they would hate the movie, because it would seemingly have no point; the only way to enjoy the movie is to really think as you’re watching and after you watch. Ask yourself, what is this movie trying to tell me?

The acting and the writing and directing are all unassuming in this movie. Everything appears natural, as though they are not acting, but living. You feel like a voyeur looking into a little private drama, it feels so real. There is nothing stilted about the acting or the dialogue, it is masterfully played; it sounds like something you would hear yourself or your friends say.

This is an excellent little movie that really makes you think about things. Don’t watch it is you don’t want to think.