Romance is the Name of Barcelona

Barcelona is a city in which romance, some of it stained by anti-romantic mockery, sits, as in Paris, with native and tourist casualness in cafés, restaurants, and parks. It is an urban dreamscape, a tourist destination, with sleek diplomats on expense accounts, where snazzy sports cars wheel around sunny tree-lined avenues and park in front of gracious old buildings, none of the buildings so large as to dwarf their inhabitants.  It is a place where one wants to visit, to stay, and to wish one’s own city or town were more like it. Such is the mood of Woody Allen’s bittersweet romantic movie, “Vicki Christina Barcelona”. As in the title, the city joins its two young American women as rivals for our attention. Barcelona is a city I have never visited and yet I can take a read on it, as that is provided by Allen’s movie. I have no idea why Allen chose to set his third European movie there (the other two were in England, “Match Point” and “Cassandra’s Dream”) except that he has always admired European auteurs. Perhaps he thinks his “serious” films (i.e., without Allen as actor) have been neglected in the USA. Or perhaps he is simply fascinated with foreign settings. In this movie, the chance to work with the two Spanish superstars, Penèlope Cruz and Javier Bardem, in a romantic plot with one American actress (Scarlet Johannsen) and one British actress (Rebecca Hall) was another of the city’s temptations.

There are several ways to summarize the story, which can be viewed as both silly and self-consciously naïve.  Two young American women, summering in Barcelona, friends but very different in temperament, meet a thirtyish Spanish divorced action painter, somewhat melancholy, either genuinely lonesome for the company of pretty young American women passing through an ancient Roman city, or a Lothario incapable of spending  a night without a woman,  predatory but with a polite, subdued, charming manner. Both women are attracted to him for the same reasons they are to Barcelona: for his style. The city has its charms, as they say, as young women do. Those charms are here to stay, as is the civilized predator. The city is here to stay after decades of violence, poverty, and neglect of its cultural uniqueness. Both the painter, Juan Antonio, and Maria Elena, his divorced wife, are two dream people, one super cool, the other wildly passionate, both incapable of living with each other although it is obvious that they are still in love. They are capable of absurd jealousy as they are devoted to their art of abstract expressionist canvasses at which they throw paint. They are just as foolish, if not more so, than the American girls, one seeking erotic and artistic adventure (Christina), the other (Vicki) finding the erotic despite her marriage engagement. Juan Antonio and Maria Elena will survive and continue to squabble, fall in and out with each other, because that is what such beautiful people do.

Which brings me to focus a bit on the city as well as the countryside around it which is part of the Catalonia of the Middle Ages, ravishingly simple and lovely. We would never know from the film that the city’s population has swollen in two decades, like the rest of the world’s big cities, as a result of influxes of people unable to sustain themselves in the country. Barcelona, Rome, Athens; all are bloated with overpopulation, their public services strained. One doesn’t have to know the city any more than do the beautiful girls (versions of Henry James’s Daisy Miller?) or the squabbling artists, because reality has little to do with one’s sense of Barcelona’s existence. It is a ravishing tourist summer and Allen bathes us in its colors, in its blue skies, in the mountains in the distance.  It is a dreamscape.

Vicky is in Barcelona ostensibly to study the language (she is shown in a Spanish class, though if she were really much of a student she would be studying Catalan because of her professed interest in “Catalan identity”).  In the heavy irony of the voiced-over narrator, Christina is a “searcher,” meaning that she cannot settle on much of anything except “artistic things” and a constant interest in men. She does take a lot of photographs, and as her interest in photography develops (helped by the ex-wife painter, and the two become erotically attached, as well as to Juan Antonio, and so we get a ménage a trois). Earlier, Vicki makes love with Juan Antonio in a park just after Christiana becomes sick just as she is about to make love with him. In the course of working out these zany romances in which all of the four participants are very serious minded, Allen shows us Barcelona (and the countryside). The various locations serve to reflect the girls’ growing interest in the painter and in the city where he lives and works, spending much of his time in cafés and in parks where guitarists perform. (In an amusing side comment, the painter tells Christina that his poet-father hates the world so much that he refuses to grant it the pleasure of publishing his poems. Such is the true artist’s life, or so it seems to the artists and their admirers.)

The views and settings for shots and scenes are many:  Antonin Gaudí and Joan Mirò architecture, sculpture, and parks. Both were modernists typical of the city’s eccentric-European spirit, rather like the renegade spirit of Catalan political history. The Mirò sculptures and the playful theme park and carousel fit Barcelona’s sunny and gay spirit, somewhat like Paris’s mix of the medieval with the Nineteenth Century. That makes sense in Paris, as such a combination does not in Chicago’s Federal Plaza, where Picasso’s huge red steel sculpture stands out as outrageously intrusive; whereas in Barcelona, Picasso’s city as much as was Paris, that would not be so. Other film locations are the interior and the fronts of the public library, the art museum, the Victorian apartment house in which the girls are staying which is both solid and light. The house in which Juan Antonio works and lives has ocher walls, the color of much of the city: a mix of Spanish and Catalan styles, the latter medieval in part Gothic, part almost pre-historical heaviness. We get several views of the city spread out before us, as the actors stand almost like props from balconies and overlooks, as we view the mountains in the distance. The low rooftops, again as in Paris, the odd cupolas and church steeples, provide an historical mix that seems off center culturally.

Such a Barcelona view matches George Orwell’s sense of Barcelona and Catalonia in the Civil War as having one foot in the past and one in the future. Some of my imagining of Barcelona takes the form of Orwell’s book, Homage to Catalonia-- despite its unfashionable critical view of the radical left, the P.O.U.M and the “Trotskyists” – which focuses in a few chapters on the city of 1936-38. So I imagine buildings in Allen’s movie through Orwell’s eyes before and after the “Visca P.O.U.M.! Viva la Revolucion!” Popular Army slogans were scrawled on the walls and hundreds of men who fought for the Loyalists were arrested by the non-Red supposedly republican forces which themselves would be suppressed, killed or tortured by the victorious Nationalists. (The politics were truly bewildering and brutal.) I can’t get out of my head Orwell’s description of the Ramblas—today one of the most fashionable and lively quarters—“with a row of militiamen, still ragged and muddy from the front, sprawling exhausted on the chairs placed there for the bootblacks.” In that year and shortly afterward, Franco’s Nationalists defeated all radical groups like the P.O.U.M and the Republicans (or Loyalists) who ceased to be an effective fighting force. Streets and plazas now the essence of the city’s vitality and rebuilding were then wrecked or made unrecognizable after Mussolini’s bombing raids, requested by Franco, and the cathedral was bombed, with more than a thousand people, including children, killed.

Allen’s movie shows in effect (no doubt not his intention) how today’s city has triumphed over the horror of the Civil War and the forty years of subsequent suppression. The modernist, progressive nature of the city is very much in Allen’s viewfinder as he pans or focuses on the marvelous cityscapes, buildings, churches, houses. It is always sunny, sophisticated, with warmly inviting cafés with artistic and intellectual discussions, the girls drinking from balloon wineglasses, dining or drinking late, which is even later in Spain than in the rest of Europe, and Juan Antonio’s nifty red sports car wheeling around the city on his romantic assignations, all these part of the erotic and artistic ambiance that Allen provides for his characters. This virtual tour of the city highlighted its beauties, vital eccentricities, from the medieval gothic cathedral to the ugliness of Gaudí’s odd assemblage of lumps of light brown stone, especially his hideously fascinating familia sagrata cathedral, still unfinished, which has established itself as a Barcelona signature image.

I have said that Barcelona is like Paris. I have been to Paris several times and the traffic, aggressive modernity, and massive immigration there have not dulled for me the panoramic romance from atop the Tuilleries ferris wheel, a blue sky and the carpet of the city before and underneath me, nor the sweep of the river with its splendid bridges, the rooftops, the tiny streets or broad avenues. All of it still takes my breath away, as does the virtual tour provided by Allen of Barcelona’s streets as they are seen from Juan Antonio’s little car, by you and me and the two protagonists of the fiction, Vicky and Christina, who are open to all this as they enjoy or agonize over their summer entanglements, looking up at the weirdly lumpy yet commanding Gaudí towers, the parks with their enchanting  mix of sculpture, gardens, children with parents or nannies. It is at one of the cafés and restaurants open at midnight and later (when the night just begins for Barcelonans) when the ruggedly handsome Spaniard first approaches the two girls who are sipping wine from enormous goblets and politely suggests that the three spend the weekend together for good food, good sights and good sex.. Exactly what one imagines the two girls had fantasized even if they hadn’t actually expected it to happen. The venues take your breath away and prepare the audience for romance, wine glasses, late dining, and beautiful people—and, of course, erotic dreams that come true.

David Zucker