'vicki cristina barcelona': a summer of sensuality, possibility and a tinge of sadness

Vicky Cristina Barcelona Directed by Woody Allen (U.S.)

Bathed in light so deliciously golden and honeyed that you might be tempted to lick the silver screen, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" is a rueful comedy about two young American women who, during a summer European idyll, savor many of the Continental delicacies that such travelers often take pleasance in - art, music, civilization, yes, but also strange bodies and unexpected dreams. These organic structure and dreaming open possibilities for the women, intimating freer, someway different lives, contempt the persistent tugging of a voice that hovers at the edge of this story trying to pull it and its fictional character down to earth, where desire can fade rapidly.

The narrative, which weaves in and out of the story like a yarn, is spoken by the actor Saint Christopher Evan Welch, but more justly belongs to Woody Allen, the film's author and manager. "Vicky Cristina," which was released Friday in the United States and opens in most parts of the world in fall and wintertime, trips along winningly, carried by the beauty of its locations and stars - and all the gauzy romanticism those enchanted places and people imply. But it reverberates with implacable melancholy, a sense of loss. Allen may be buoyed (like the rest of us) by his recent creative Christ's Resurrection, but this is still the same glum clown who, after the premiere of "Match Point," his coal black, near pitch-perfect 2005 drama, commented that cynicism was just an surrogate spelling of world. Ah, life! Ah, Woody!

Ah, wild of a heart that knows what it wants even when the rest of the body does not! Sensible Vicky (Rebekah Hall) insists that she knows what she wants - her dull fiancé in New York, for one - while dreamy Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) does not. The two have traveled to Barcelona so that Vicky, who speaks little Spanish, can work on her masters in Catalan culture, while Cristina plays her foil, and we play virtual tourist amid the city's Gaudí splendors. With the narrator setting the brisk, at times rushed, pace, the women move in with some acquaintances (Patricia Clarkson and Kevin Dunn), but their sentimental education doesn't really begin until they meet one of Spain's national treasures: Javier Bardem.

Bardem slithers into "Vicky Cristina" (and in that order) like a snake in the garden, wrapping himself around the two women with blissful, insinuating, sensuous ease. He's the celebrated painter Juan Antonio, one of those artistic sybarites who attack both women and canvases with bold strokes. Eyes hooded, smile taunting, he invites the Americans to fly away for the weekend - a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, thou and thou - a proposition that inspires mockery from Vicky and girlish excitement in Cristina. Bardem, relieved of his ghoulish Prince Valiant bob from "No Country for Old Men," invests the cliché of the Latin lover with so much humor and feeling that he quickly vanquishes the stereotype.

The same goes for Penélope Cruz, who plays a combustible Judy to Bardem's smoldering Punch. As Maria Elena, Juan Antonio's unstable former wife (an incident with a blade botched their happily ever after), Cruz has her own type to surmount, which she does with fire, smoke and comedy. With her artfully tousled hair and watchful eyes, Maria Elena is a classic screen siren (and totally crazy chick), but one with the pulse of a real woman. Cruz, slipping between Spanish and English (the latter was once a serious obstacle for her), does especially nice work with her voice, which seductively lowers and sometimes rises with animal intensity, suggesting a more variegated interior world than that provided by Allen's writing.

Maria Elena and Juan Antonio give the film such a twinned jolt of energy that you may wish it would head off into Almódovar country, but that wouldn't be true to Allen, for whom desire remains an agony.

Still, he's enough of an entertainer to give the audience its pleasures, which partly accounts for Johansson. She isn't much of an actress, but it doesn't terribly matter in his films: She gives him succulent youth, and he cushions her with enough laughs to distract you from her lack of skill. The appealing Hall, whose jaw line and brittle delivery evoke Katharine Hepburn, furnishes an actual performance, one that, tinged with sadness, makes evident that this is as much a tragedy as a comedy.

There will always be an audience that hungers for a certain kind of Woody Allen movie, but it's a relief that he has moved away from the safety and provincialism of his New York. Working in Britain for his previous three films and in Spain for this one has had a liberating effect, perhaps because it's made it easier for him to step down as a leading man. He gave himself a sizable role in "Scoop," but mostly he fluttered around Johansson, tossing off jokes. He was playing the fool rather than inhabiting one, as had become his custom in those films in which he clutched at much younger actresses with whom he never found the right rhythm.