Still learning to love

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Warning: this article contains some plot spoilers

When best friends Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) decide to go to Barcelona for the summer, they have very different agendas. Vicky is soon to be married to a very respectable and ambitious young man, Doug (Chris Messina). So she wants to spend her last months as a single woman doing research for her Masters’ degree thesis on Catalan identity. The voiceover narration explains that, ‘Vicky had no tolerance for pain and no lust for combat. She was grounded and realistic. Her requirements in a man were seriousness and stability. She had become engaged to Doug because he was decent and successful and understood the beauty of commitment.’ But while Vicky is sensible, studious and cautious, Cristina is anything but. She has no inhibitions, and, having recently broken up with one boyfriend, is eager to find new sexual relationships in her quest to find her ideal romantic partner. The narrator tells us, ‘She had reluctantly accepted suffering as an inevitable component of deep passion, and was resigned to putting her feelings at risk. If you asked her what it was she was gambling her emotions on to win, she would not have been able to say. She knew what she didn’t want, however, and that was exactly what Vicky valued above all else.’

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is written and directed by Woody Allen, who has a screenwriting and directing career stretching back over forty years. Many critics see it as his best work in recent years, though still not coming up to the standards of his finest work in the late seventies and eighties. His starting point for this film was wanting to create a story in which the city of Barcelona was a ‘character’. He outlines the contrast between his two central characters:

A person who’s more conventionally middle-class like Vicky, stands to have what most people would consider a happier life. It’s a more structured, a more stable, and a more well-functioning life.  It may not achieve any goals she has that are beyond it, but she’ll have a good life with her husband, who’s a nice guy, and it will be fine. Whereas a character like Cristina has less of a chance of satisfying herself, because she’s always looking, and she only knows what she doesn’t want. But she’ll have a more varied menu, until maybe someday she’ll get lucky and something will drop into her lap.

Vicky and Cristina stay with Judy (Patricia Clarkson) and Mark (Kevin Dunn), distant relatives of Vicky, who take them one evening to a reception in an art gallery. Cristina is immediately smitten by a man called Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem). Judy whispers that he is a painter who had an extremely explosive relationship with his ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz in the role for which she won a Best Supporting Acress Oscar), resulting in her trying to kill him. Rather than warning her off him, this only makes Cristina all the more interested. Later, the two young women find themselves having dinner in the same restaurant as Juan Antonia, and Cristina catches his eye again. Eventually, he comes across to invite them to join him on a trip to Oviedo, a short flight away. He explains that they will leave in an hour, and he plans to view a particular sculpture which he finds inspiring. Vicky is extremely sceptical, and has her worse fears confirmed when Juan Antonio outlines his plan for them to look around the city, eat well, drink good wine and make love. Despite Vicky’s protestations, Cristina immediately agrees, seeing it as a romantic adventure.

The sculpture is of Jesus, prompting Cristina to inquire whether Juan Antonio is religious. He insists strongly that he is not, and adds, ‘The trick is to enjoy life, accepting it has no meaning whatsoever.’ ‘No meaning? You don't think that authentic love gives life meaning?’ protests Cristina. ‘Yes,’ he replies, ‘but love is so transient. Isn't it?’

The lack of any substantial meaning to life is a familiar theme in Woody Allen’s films, even as far back as Zelig (1983): ‘I ask the rabbi the meaning of life. He tells me the meaning of life but he tells it to me in Hebrew. I don't understand Hebrew. Then he wants to charge me $600 for Hebrew lessons.’ In an interview about Match Point in Empire (April 2005), he remarked, ‘With every discovery that science makes, it becomes clearer and clearer that all existence is here by chance, with no meaning, no purpose.’ Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), the central character in that film, says almost exactly the same thing, as well as vainly wishing that he might be brought to justice for his crime, since then there would be ‘some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning.’ He explored very similar territory in one of his best films, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). It is clear that Allen believes that life has no overarching meaning. Any hope that the cosmos will come up trumps, revealing its meaning or bringing about genuine justice, is nothing more than fantasy. Nevertheless, he sees that life can still be enjoyed; there are glimmers of meaning in our appreciation of beauty or in our experiences of love.

At the end of the day’s sightseeing in Oviedo, Juan Antonio invites the girls to his room. Vicky is cross that he has made this suggestion again, and Cristina reminds him that Vicky is about to be married. He seems to think she should make the most of her ‘last days of freedom’, but Vicky insists that she is not free, but is committed to Doug. She accuses Juan Antonio of still feeling the hurt of his failed marriage to Maria Elena, and that he is ‘just trying to lose [himself] in empty sex.’ ‘Empty sex?’ he replies. ‘Do you have such a low opinion of yourself.’ The suggestion is that however fleeting a sexual encounter Juan Antonio experiences, it can still have some (transient) meaning for him, and therefore for Vicky, too. Cristina, unsurprisingly, accepts his invitation to his room, but she becomes ill as they are about to go to bed together. Vicky therefore has to spend the following day alone with the amorous Spaniard. As the day unfolds, she discovers that there is far more depth to him than she had imagined, and begins to find herself being attracted to him.

Back in Barcelona, Vicky cannot get Juan Antonio out of her mind, but Cristina soon moves in with him, making her friend rather jealous. Into this already complex mix come Doug, determined to marry his fiancée immediately in this romantic city, and Maria Elena, who has attempted suicide and then comes to stay in Juan Antonio’s house. Maria Elena is intense, extremely jealous of the young blonde American sharing her ex-husband’s bed, and prone to erratic mood swings. For her part, Cristina is very disturbed by the presence of this powerful personality and clear rival for Juan Antonio’s affection. The narrator dryly observes that, ‘She was not quite as open-minded as she thought.’ In time, Maria Elena seems to regain some equilibrium, and even suggests that Cristina is the ‘missing ingredient’ which enables Maria Elena and Juan Antonio to live together, a perspective which ultimately leads to the three of them becoming lovers.

While the previously sensible Vicky struggles with her feelings, torn between her conventional, safe but somewhat dull husband and the romantic but dangerous Spaniard, Cristina is moving in the other direction. The narrator tells us that, ‘Thoughts started to take precedence over feelings; thoughts about life and love.’ Cristina finally becomes overwhelmed with a sense of ‘chronic dissatisfaction’ and realises that she must do something.

Ultimately, Cristina’s aimlessness dooms her to such dissatisfaction. At the start of the film, Cristina is described as knowing only that what she doesn’t want is what Vicky values: stability, commitment, faithfulness. At the end, not much has changed, in some ways, and  the narrator’s final comments sum up her predicament: ‘Cristina continued searching, convinced only of what she doesn’t want.’ Since she does not know what she really wants, it is impossible for her to know when she had found something that will bring her the happiness she craves.

As with a number of more recent Woody Allen films, it is hard to be sure with which of his characters his own sympathies lie. Probably the answer to this is that they are with all four of the central characters up to a point. He is drawn to the passion and intensity of Maria Elena, but he recognises that ‘she’s too full of passion, too full of feeling, and it ruins her from really accomplishing things in a certain sense.’ The film portrays Juan Antonio in a more positive light than we expect at first, and it seems that Allen values the painter’s strong sense of personal freedom, undisturbed by others’ assessment of his morality. Vicky’s conservative nature seems to come unravelled, and the story may appear to be dismissive of her desire for ‘the safety of a less risky formula existence.’ And yet, perhaps it is Vicky who will be more content with life, in that she will settle down to a comfortable life with Doug, tinged perhaps by a little regret over what might have been. Rebecca Hall, who plays her, remarks, ‘I think Woody’s looking into the tension between the fantasy-land of love and the real world. The things you live with as opposed to the things you dream about. And then what happens when your fantasies intrude on your real world.

Cristina probably comes closest to Woody Allen’s own perspectives. Scarlett Johansson is somewhat of a muse for Allen, having acted in three of his last four films. He says, ‘Every now and then in my professional life, I find an actress with the kind of gift that inspires me to create parts for.’ Johansson notes, ‘I think Woody and I have a very similar sensibility . . . and when I read his scripts I feel very connected to them.’ Allen’s personal life perhaps suggests that he has experienced the same restlessness as Cristina; he too is a lost soul.

As he has so often done, he raises good questions and fails to find any substantive answers. In Match Point he recognised that a triumph of justice would indicate that meaning is inherent in the world, yet he deliberately turned his back on this possibility within the narrative. Ironically, viewers instinctively recognise that justice had not been achieved, and that there is something wrong about this. The final indifference of Chris Wilton is chilling, begging the question of where such a deep desire for justice in the human heart comes from. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the focus is on love. For Juan Antonio, and maybe for Allen, love is the one thing that can bring some sense of meaning, despite its transience.

What he doesn’t spot, or refuses to face up to, is that there is something much deeper going on here. Just as we have an innate longing for justice, we also have an innate longing for love that is not transient, that is lasting, committed, exclusive and faithful. This film falsely caricatures this kind of relationship as dully conservative, in sharp contrast with the exotic unconventionality of Juan Antonio’s ménage à trois, which may or may not reflect Allen’s sexual fantasies. As Cristina discovers, it is dissatisfying because this is not how love is meant to work. Social conventions are not inherently wrong; indeed, in the area of marriage, our ‘conventions’ are a reflection of how sexual relationships should be function. This is how God made us, and countless generations of human beings have discovered that it works, providing, of course, that we follow the blueprint of finding intimacy through absolute exclusivity, self-sacrificing commitment and tender love. Such relationships are a reflection of the relationship God wants to have with his creation: we were made to live in a loving, committed relationship with him, in which he has the exclusive rights to our worship. This is precisely why we have this deep longing to find the right person to spend the rest of our lives with. Allen clearly doesn’t want to accept this, though he never quite lets the idea of God go. His work is frequently characterised by a light-hearted bleakness, but he keeps returning to questions of meaning again and again. Like Cristina, he also seems to be searching, convinced only of what he doesn’t want – or doesn’t believe in.

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