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Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Directed byb Woody Allen
Starring Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem
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Woody Allen is one of our most inventive and constantly surprising cinematic artists who has spanned almost four decades with great films. Sure, he's had his artistic slips. But he has also given us some of the most innovative films in the contemporary canon: Annie Hall, Manhattan, Zelig, Another Woman, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Sleeper. Even when he's not at top form he's engaging and funny. But the Allen sensibility is always the same: passively male, very Jewish, very New York, and very heterosexual. That's no indictment. But the one thing you would never, ever expect to see in a Woody Allen movies was a gay sensibility. That is, until his just released — and brilliant — Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

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What is it about Vicky Cristina Barcelona that gives it a gay sensibility? It's not that Cristina ends up having sex with Maria Elena (played by the insanely fiery Penelope Cruz) — that's simply a plot detail — but rather that what Allen has done here is to portray a series of heterosexual relationships with the understanding, empathy, and emotional acumen that we usually associate with gay relationships. Like all relationships, the plot of Vicky Cristina Barcelona is both deceptively simple and endlessly complicated.

Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and her friend Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) are two late-twentysomethings on vacation in Barcelona. Vicky is a conventional semi-professional engaged to a boring but sincere banker type, and Cristina is a free spirit who is lost in a world beyond her emotional control. They see the roguish Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) at the opening of an art galley. Later that evening he tries to pick them both up in a restaurant. Cristina is intrigued, and Vicky is moderately repelled by his forwardness. He convinces them to fly to a small Spanish city to look at some art and sleeps with a willing Cristina, and later has an intense one-night stand with Vicky. Juan Antonio and Vicky are deeply attracted to one another, but she marries her boring fiancè and he takes up full time with Cristina until his former wife — the mentally unbalanced Maria Elena — arrives and then amid much arguing they all become lovers. Meanwhile Juan Antonia and Vicky endure unrequited love and Cristina simply drifts about in her mènage ö trois until she feels insignificant compared to Maria Elena. Vicky and Juan Antonio try to get together and that doesn't work and Juan Antonio and Maria Elena just make one another insane.

Except for the incidental lesbianism, all of the romance here is very heterosexual — but Allen's attitudes to relationships and his ability to convey the intricate, mercurial intersections of emotion and sexuality, romance and passion, feel so much more homosexual than heterosexual. If we didn't know that Allen was completely straight, we'd think that Vicky Cristina Barcelona was directed by a closeted man who was simply substituting heterosexuality for his own homosexual experience. It's not that heterosexuals don't have complicated love lives and unconventional romantic and sexual urges — of course they do — but rather that we never see this honestly and forthrightly represented on the screen.

Allen does all of this without moralizing. No one ends up particularly happy here — but that isn't because they are being punished for sexual transgressions as if this were Madam Bovary or Anna Karenina, but because, well, life and love are complicated and no one ends up with what they want.

As a narrative, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is held together by an off-screen male voice — spoken by Christopher Evan Welch — who dispassionately describes the characters' feelings, fears, motivations and hopes. Allen has used the voice-over narrator before, most notably himself in Annie Hall and the newscaster in Zelig, and it has always been effective.

But in Vicky Cristina Barcelona this disembodied voice takes on a new role, that of a natural observer who simply comments on the emotional and sexual idiosyncrasies of these women and men who have discovered that the rules that heterosexual society has put into place are essentially nonsense and don't work. This is, in the broader context of Allen's heterosexuality, the new voice of gay sensibility and sexuality and it makes Vicky Cristina Barcelona one of the best gay films this year.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com