Perhaps Woody Allen is just a dirty old man. His relationship with, and marriage to, his adoptive step-daughter is well publicised. And recent films, such as 2005’s Match Point, have centred not so much around the philosophical conflicts and neuroses of his earlier works as on his latest muse Scarlett Johansson's cleavage.
After a series of damp-squib releases set in London, Allen has moved onto Barcelona — and taken a great deal of controversy with him. The involvement of the Catalan tourism authorities in funding Vicky Cristina Barcelona sparked a debate around whether the film was anything more than a combination of Allen's lustful yearnings after young, beautiful women and a glorified advert for Catalan holidays.
As the latter (the advert), the film is a triumph. Barcelona looks beautiful, and Allen seems to have a better connection to it than he did to London, where he struggled to get beyond hackneyed, big-red-buses-and-the-river-Thames cinematography.
As for the former (Allen’s dirty-old-man syndrome), if a ruthlessly self-deprecating and hilarious spoof on-set diary Allen wrote for the Guardian is anything to go by, he is perfectly aware of these implications and is happier joking about them than trying to refute them. It should be noted, though, that this hardly neutralises their sexist potential — and nor does the fact that Barcelona itself, as much as, if not more than the three female protagonists, is rendered as the subject of sexual gaze and an object of lust. However, these factors at the very least suggest that there's a little more to the film than an abuse of his directorial power to make Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz kiss each other.
In terms of its substantive content, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a great deal less heavyweight than its philosophising voice-over wants us to believe. But taken within the context of Allen's oeuvre, its examination of the frictions and tensions generated by conflicting conceptions of romantic love provide a worthwhile addition to a body of work that one might reasonably assess, perhaps albeit only in a crude sense, as dialectical.
Allen is an admirer of Sergei Eisenstein, whose essay A Dialectical Approach to Film Form explored the possibility of using various cinematic techniques to place the tension of opposites and conflicts between opposing forces at the heart of a film. Eisenstein, of course, intended the techniques to be applied to order to allow a more effective exposition of class struggle, but Allen has used them to great effect down the years to consider a range of more abstract philosophical conflicts and struggles; tragedy and comedy, for example, or the conflict between Judaism as religious dogma and Jewishness as a more ambiguous cultural space.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona doesn't even approach the profundity of a film like Annie Hall or Crimes and Misdemeanors, but its sumptuous locations and cinematography (if nothing else) make it the most eminently watchable of Allen's films for a decade. And its attempt, however lightweight, to place at its centre an animating conflict between opposing forces helps raise it above the level of mere misogynistic gazing.
Woody Allen may be an old dog (and one who appears to know it), but there is apparently life in him yet.
