Vicky Cristina Barcelona

All right, folks. This blog won't become a movie review website overnight. But when it comes to Woody Allen, I am ready to make an exception.

Once every three films, the guy comes up with a jewel. He already made gold (Annie Hall), silver (Manathan) and emerald (Match Point), but this one film I will put in the category: "purple silk". You'll tell me that we don't know of any jewel made out of purple silk, but that's not the point.

The way I see it, the genius of the guy is that he keeps making the same movie decade after decade and always finds a new spotlight to illuminate the script. And the script, here again, is about love and relationships.

A girl ready to fall in love (Cristina) but who never quite achieves it; another girl (Vicky) decided not to fall in love but who cannot help it when circumstances give a hand; a Spanish Casanova who seeks more than a one-night stand and less than a lifetime relation, which he yet seems to be bound to due to a passionate fellow-artist (Penelope Cruz) with whom he maintains a post-divorce love/hate relationship.
And just to make sure every generation in the audience has a chance to fall under the spell of this subtle yet dangerous session of love psychoanalysis, a woman rolling to her sixties also questions her marriage and shows signs of splitting from the all fucking program.

For no relationship here can be called rock-solid. The initial love triangle develops into more triangles, each of these triangles containing a meaning, a possibility of love never finding its balance. "True love" exists in synchrony, but not in diachrony. Each day that passes brings a new ingredient to the cooking process and in the end everybody wonders if it's not too soon to lay the table.