Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)
Film Overview
Two American friends spend a summer in Barcelona and discover that their very different ideas about love become considerably less certain after meeting Spanish painter Juan Antonio and his volatile former wife María Elena.
Rebecca Hall plays Vicky, sensible, intellectually curious and engaged to Doug, played by Chris Messina. Scarlett Johansson plays Cristina, impulsive, romantically adventurous and determined not to settle for a relationship that does not feel extraordinary.
While staying with Judy and Mark Nash in Barcelona, the two women meet painter Juan Antonio, played by Javier Bardem. His first invitation is startlingly direct: travel with him to Oviedo for the weekend, see the city, drink wine and make love.
Vicky rejects the proposition immediately. Cristina is fascinated. Their responses seem to confirm everything each woman believes about herself until events begin moving in precisely the opposite direction.
Penélope Cruz enters later as María Elena, Juan Antonio’s former wife and artistic collaborator. Her return changes the emotional balance completely, particularly once Cristina becomes part of the relationship between them.
Javier Aguirresarobe photographs Barcelona and Asturias with a warm, tactile beauty, while Spanish guitar, flamenco, Catalan music and Giulia y Los Tellarini’s unforgettable title song give the film one of the most distinctive soundtracks in Allen’s work.
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My Review
A summer in which everybody discovers desire is easier than certainty
Vicky Cristina Barcelona is built around four people who have very strong ideas about love and almost no ability to make reality behave according to those ideas.
Vicky believes in stability. Cristina believes in passion. Juan Antonio believes love does not have to obey conventional rules. María Elena appears to believe almost nothing that remains true for more than a few minutes.
The pleasure of the film comes from watching each position become unstable. Nobody is simply proved right or wrong.
Barcelona gives them the time and distance from ordinary life to find out that desire becomes much more complicated once it stops being theoretical.
Vicky and Cristina arrive in Spain believing they know what kind of love they want. The summer is mostly devoted to proving they do not.
Rebecca Hall gives Vicky the harder role because her changes happen mostly inside. She is engaged to Doug and expects the future they have planned together to be satisfying.
There is nothing obviously wrong with Doug. That is important. If he were simply awful, Vicky’s attraction to Juan Antonio would require very little examination.
Instead, Juan Antonio awakens something she had not included in the plan. Suddenly stability begins to feel slightly different from certainty.
Hall is excellent at showing a woman irritated by her own feelings because they contradict the identity she has carefully constructed.
Scarlett Johansson’s Cristina begins from the opposite position. She has already rejected the idea of settling for ordinary happiness and believes she will recognise the correct passion when it arrives.
Juan Antonio appears almost designed for her philosophy. He is handsome, artistic, direct and completely uninterested in pretending attraction needs months of conventional courtship.
Their relationship initially seems to prove Cristina right. Then María Elena returns and something unexpected happens: rather than simply destroying the relationship, she completes it.
Cristina discovers that unconventional love can be genuinely satisfying and still fail to provide a permanent answer.
Cristina finally finds the unconventional relationship she thought she wanted and discovers that even freedom can become something you eventually need to leave.
Javier Bardem plays Juan Antonio with enough calm to keep the character from becoming a parody of seductive European masculinity.
His opening invitation is outrageous, yet he delivers it without aggression. He simply sees no reason to disguise what he wants behind a more respectable social ritual.
That honesty is attractive partly because everyone else spends so much time explaining their desires indirectly.
Yet Juan Antonio is not emotionally free. María Elena remains the person with whom his artistic and romantic life is most deeply entangled.
Penélope Cruz changes the film the moment María Elena arrives. She brings a completely different energy — funny, dangerous, perceptive and almost impossible to predict.
The remarkable thing is that María Elena is not simply the jealous ex-wife standing in the way of Juan Antonio’s new relationship. She and Cristina develop a connection of their own.
The three-person relationship briefly creates an equilibrium that Juan Antonio and María Elena were incapable of sustaining as a couple.
Cristina becomes the stabilising element inside a relationship she originally entered because stability was exactly what she did not want.
Cristina enters Juan Antonio and María Elena’s life looking for passion and accidentally becomes the most stable person in the room.
Cruz deserved the awards that followed because María Elena could easily have been overwhelming. Instead, her volatility is connected to intelligence, artistic frustration and genuine emotional history.
She understands Juan Antonio better than Cristina does and resents him more deeply because of it. She can attack his work and then collaborate with him. She can reject him and remain inseparable from him.
Their inability to live peacefully together does not eliminate their artistic connection.
That distinction gives the relationship far more interest than simple romantic incompatibility.
Patricia Clarkson’s Judy provides the film’s quieter warning. She watches Vicky approach marriage while privately recognising dissatisfaction inside her own.
Judy’s life appears comfortable and successful. She has the kind of marriage Vicky assumes she wants.
Yet she has reached a point where comfort itself has begun to feel like something she settled into rather than consciously chose.
Her attempts to encourage Vicky towards Juan Antonio are therefore partly an attempt to rewrite her own history through somebody younger.
Judy does not simply want Vicky to choose Juan Antonio. She wants proof that somebody can still make the choice she wishes she had made herself.
Barcelona is essential. Park Güell, La Pedrera, the Sagrada Família, Santa Maria del Mar and the city’s streets create an environment in which art and architecture are constantly present.
Allen does not use the city realistically in the documentary sense. This is Barcelona filtered through the emotional experience of visitors who have temporarily stepped outside their normal lives.
The trip to Asturias broadens that feeling. Oviedo, Mount Naranco and Avilés give Vicky’s relationship with Juan Antonio physical distance from Barcelona and from Doug.
The geography therefore becomes part of the emotional permission the characters give themselves.
The soundtrack may be even more important. Giulia y Los Tellarini’s Barcelona immediately establishes a relaxed, slightly eccentric rhythm.
Paco de Lucía’s Entre dos aguas provides extraordinary guitar work, while Isaac Albéniz, Juan Serrano, Biel Ballester and Stéphane Wrembel broaden the musical landscape.
Unlike an Allen soundtrack dominated by familiar American jazz, this one feels inseparable from Spain.
The guitar becomes almost another narrator, accompanying people who keep trying to explain emotions more complicated than their explanations.
The music does for Barcelona what Gershwin once did for Manhattan: it makes the city feel emotionally inseparable from the story being told inside it.
The ending is deliberately circular. Vicky returns to Doug and the life she had planned. Cristina remains unwilling to accept a relationship that does not feel right, even though she still cannot define what right would look like.
Neither woman has solved anything.
That is exactly why the ending works. A summer of extraordinary experiences has changed their understanding without supplying a practical answer.
Vicky knows certainty can contain doubt. Cristina knows freedom can contain restlessness.
They leave Barcelona with more experience and almost exactly the same questions they brought with them.
For me, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is one of Allen’s most successful European films because the location, music and relationships all support the same idea.
It is not arguing for marriage, affairs, monogamy or unconventional relationships. Every arrangement in the film contains the possibility of satisfaction and dissatisfaction at the same time.
Cruz is sensational, Hall is quietly excellent, Bardem understands the film’s relaxed tone and Johansson completes a fascinating run of three very different performances for Allen.
Barcelona provides the summer. Nobody manages to turn it into a permanent philosophy.
Cast and Characters
Rebecca Hall
Engaged, practical and convinced she understands the kind of relationship she wants until Spain introduces a possibility she had not planned for.
Scarlett Johansson
Vicky’s adventurous friend, determined to reject conventional romance but equally uncertain about what should replace it.
Javier Bardem
A Barcelona painter whose direct approach to love draws both visitors into his complicated emotional history.
Penélope Cruz
Juan Antonio’s brilliant and volatile former wife, whose return completely changes the emotional balance of the summer.
Patricia Clarkson
Vicky and Cristina’s host, whose apparently comfortable marriage conceals her own doubts about choices made years earlier.
Chris Messina
Vicky’s dependable fiancé, representing the secure American future she has already chosen before travelling to Spain.
Spanish guitar turns Barcelona into part of the romance
Flamenco, Catalan music, classical guitar and contemporary Barcelona musicians give the film a soundtrack tied completely to its Spanish setting.
Barcelona
Giulia y Los Tellarini’s loose, infectious song opens the film and gives it an immediately identifiable musical character. Its slightly unruly energy suits a summer in which everybody’s carefully stated ideas about love begin coming apart.
Flamenco, Catalan tradition and modern acoustic jazz
Paco de Lucía, Juan Serrano, Isaac Albéniz, Biel Ballester and Stéphane Wrembel all contribute to the film’s distinctive Spanish musical identity.
Allen assembled the soundtrack from artists both famous and relatively little known internationally, creating music that feels tied to the locations rather than imported from his usual New York repertoire.
Entre dos aguas
The great flamenco guitarist’s celebrated instrumental brings a much deeper musical intensity to the film’s Spanish atmosphere.
Asturias
Performed by Juan Quesada, the work becomes particularly appropriate once the story itself leaves Barcelona for Asturias.
El noi de la mare
Muriel Anderson performs the Catalan folk melody in a classical-guitar arrangement associated with Miguel Llobet and Andrés Segovia.
Big Brother
Wrembel’s acoustic jazz broadens the soundtrack while retaining the guitar-led identity that runs throughout the film.
Locations
Barcelona and Asturias are far more than background. The architecture, galleries, streets and landscapes create the temporary world in which Vicky and Cristina allow themselves to test completely different versions of life.
Park Güell
Gaudí’s extraordinary park is one of the film’s most recognisable Barcelona locations and the setting for an encounter between Vicky and Juan Antonio.
La Pedrera
Gaudí’s Casa Milà appears as Vicky and Cristina explore the architecture of Barcelona.
Santa Maria del Mar
The great Gothic church is incorporated into the women’s early exploration of the city.
Sagrada Família
Another of Gaudí’s defining buildings reinforces the sense that art and architecture surround virtually every stage of the summer.
Oviedo & Mount Naranco
The weekend away from Barcelona gives Vicky, Cristina and Juan Antonio a different landscape and creates the conditions for the first major change in their relationships.
Avilés
Avilés locations, including the San Juan lighthouse area and streets around the historic centre, become part of the supposedly spontaneous weekend trip.
Awards and Recognition
Penélope Cruz Wins
Cruz won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as María Elena.
Penélope Cruz Wins
Cruz also received the BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Best Motion Picture
The film won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy.
Four Nominations
The film’s nominations also recognised Javier Bardem, Rebecca Hall and Penélope Cruz.
Out of Competition
The film premiered internationally at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival outside competition.
A Major European Success
The film became one of the most commercially successful releases of Allen’s career and a defining entry in his European period.