Fun and fantasy in 'Barcelona'

Only seven months after the dead-serious “Cassandra’s Dream,” Woody Allen is back with film No. 38, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” which is nearly the opposite in tone. A gentle romance/comedy more than a “romantic comedy” in the usual sense, it traces the adventures of two young women (Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall, who also worked together in “The Prestige”) on vacation in Spain.

Allen lets us know very early on that Vicky (Hall) is the more “grown up,” with all the attendant pluses and minuses: She’s engaged to a successful young business type (Chris Messina) and is working on her master’s thesis on Catalan identity. (I’ll confess that, after the first mention, I struggled to imagine what “cattle and identity” could mean.) She’s on track toward a perfect upper-middle-class (or higher) life, but the tracks are too rigid for surprise or adventure.

Cristina, on the other hand, is impetuous — maybe even flighty — driven by romance more than responsibility. Unlike Vicky, who goes to Barcelona to do some research, Cristina (typically) is looking for a new scene after her latest relationship’s breakup. While staying with Judy (Patricia Clarkson) and Mark (Kevin Dunn), an older couple related to Vicky, they are approached by artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), who introduces himself and then suggests all three of them have a romantic adventure, capped by a ménage à trois.

True to form, Vicky is quite understandably dismissive of this come-on; almost as understandably, Cristina is game. Juan Antonio flies them to Oviedo, where beauty and food and wine and music all conspire to create a mood of romantic inevitability. But, after Cristina is sidelined, Vicky — who has come along essentially as a chaperone — discovers herself to be a little less controlled and certain about things than she realized.

Still, it’s Cristina who moves in with Juan Antonio, an arrangement that appears threatened when his crazy ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz), shows up for an indefinite stay. This unpromising arrangement leads to an unexpected, more complicated set of relationships.

While I have never — well, had never — indulged in thoughts of being in bed with both Johansson and Cruz specifically, I think we can safely suggest that being in bed with two drop-dead gorgeous women is a common, if not universal, hetero male’s fantasy. (I will assume that there might be a woman or two out there with fantasies about Bardem, as well.) But, oddly, we don’t see things from Juan Antonio’s point of view. Vicky is the closest thing to a protagonist, but Allen’s stylistic choices tend to keep us at a voyeuristic distance from all the characters.

There is an opposite male fantasy as well: some time ago — in reference to the popularity of his second novel among male journalists — Larry McMurtry wrote in New York magazine, “I don’t believe I know a class of people who are as clearly the captives of their own fantasies as the male journalists among my acquaintances, and it slowly became evident to me that ‘Leaving Cheyenne’ had happened to express … a primary male-journalist fantasy: that of being able to sleep with one’s best friend’s wife or girlfriend without there being any hard feelings on the part of the best friend.”

McMurtry then unfavorably compared his book to “Jules and Jim” — both Francois Truffaut’s film and the Henri-Pierre Roche novel on which it was based — which dealt with a similar situation. If “Hollywood Ending” was slightly influenced by Leo McCarey and “Stardust Memories” a good deal more than slightly influenced by Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2,” then “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” feels like Allen’s “Jules and Jim.”

A few years ago, Allen said, “The directors that have personal, emotional feelings for me are Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, and I’m sure there has been some influence but never a direct one. I never set out to try and do anything like them.”

But, last week in the LA Times, he somewhat contradicted that: “I always wanted to make the kinds of films that I saw in the 1950s. The Truffaut films and the Godard films and the Bergmans and Fellinis, and those are the films that always influenced my work. And I’ve always copied them and been influenced by them.”

Whatever: It would be ridiculous to expect someone’s remarks to be utterly consistent over the course of a week, let alone a lifetime. Copy ... influence ... direct or indirect — no shame in any of them as long as the outcome is good, which in this case it is.

Allen is smart enough to mention Truffaut first, since its impact on “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” is clear right off the bat. The most obvious similarity is the use of an omniscient narrator telling the story — a technique infinitely more common (for obvious reasons) on the page than on the screen: Books tell us stories, while movies are supposed to be all about showing them.

Another reason voice-over narration in film is often obtrusive is because it’s frequently applied after-the-fact to films that have clarity problems — or films that are perceived by doltish studio execs as having clarity problems, as with “Blade Runner” — which is clearly not the case here.

Still, I have mixed feelings about Allen’s implementation. Allen’s most famous use of a narrative voice-over was his own character Alvy in “Annie Hall.” So, at first, I kept expecting one of the characters here to eventually be revealed as the narrator. Even after I gave up on that, the technique is problematic: Along with the multiple POVs, it’s the main mechanism keeping us from direct identification with either Vicky or Cristina, let alone Juan Antonio or Maria Elena.

There has already been some criticism of the film’s disconnection from the world the rest of us live in; that is, these people never seem to worry about money and rarely seem to work. The same could be said, of course, of all but the most consciously political comedies of the 1930s and ‘40s; they’re not supposed to reflect all the dull, quotidian stuff. Allen has never pretended to be reflecting the lives of the “little people,” except, perhaps, in “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” which made a point of both the wonder and the absurdity of life up on the screen.

The voice-over gives “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” the feeling of a fairy tale; while it might take place in a fairytale world, the story is driven by sometimes unpleasant complexities. (Not that fairy tales are always pleasant or simple.) Vicky and Cristina are obvious stand-ins for warring impulses within most of us; and Allen genially, gently suggests how close opposites can be.