Woody Allen borrows Truffaut's humor and attitude but uses them solely for diversion — and Vicky Cristina Barcelona is diverting enough, with amusing situations and dialogue.  There's nothing at stake in the film, however, or in the lives of its characters, except the gratification of passing moods.  The two artists in the film, whom Allen might possibly see as positive characters, in fact produce generic “modern art”, abstractions as devoid of meaning as their lives.

One of the title characters is interested in Gaudi, and Gaudi's work is featured in the movie from time to time, but filmed in such a way that its architectural forms are unreadable.  Barcelona, itself one of the title characters, is never evoked with any precision or enthusiasm — the film has no real sense of place or atmosphere, or no more than one could get from a tourist brochure.

We are left with the pleasure of watching some very fine actors go through their paces.  Javier Bardem reveals a deft sense of comic timing — he seems to realize that the character he's playing is an idiot, even if you're never quite sure Allen does.

The three female characters are all portrayed as immature, weak and neurotic — they have none of the self-possessed willfulness of Jeanne Moreau's Catherine in Jules et Jim, her sense of joyful romantic nihilism.  Scarlett Johansson and Penélope Cruz are always intriguing to watch on screen but the real bravura performance here is by Rebecca Hall, who was so wonderful in The Prestige.  She's just as wonderful in this film, in an entirely different role and performing with an entirely convincing American accent.

She has none of the glamor or obvious sex appeal of Johansson or Cruz, but she rivets attention by the truth of her performance, and her subtle erotic awakening is far more vexing than the overt sensuality of her co-stars.  Allen seems to recognize this, which makes it all the more infuriating that Hall's character has no development.  None of the characters do.  They have “experiences” which leave them all essentially unchanged.

You have to remember in writing film stories that it is not like
writing for the theater — the film audience is not an audience that is
awake, it is an audience that is dreaming.

I was sorry to hear recently about the death of painter and critic Manny Farber.  I love Farber's paintings but must confess to having decidedly mixed feelings about his film criticism, for which he's generally better known.  He strikes me as someone who had acute intuitions about movies but was never able to find a critical language capable of explicating them.  He came up with wonderful terms like “negative space” but their meanings shifted so mercurially that you could never be sure exactly what he wanted them to convey.  I defy anyone to come up with a definition for “negative space” which applies to all the contexts in which Farber used it.

Farber also lapsed frequently into language so obtuse that no meaning of any kind can be teased out of it.  I don't think this was the result of pretension, or lack of intelligence — I think it was the result of frustrated passion.  He knew something extraordinary was happening in the film or scene he was discussing, he knew there was no conventional critical language with which it could be described, so he just riffed, out beyond the limits of rational communication, and hoped to get the sense of what he felt across.

This sort of approach can work — but so can simply shouting, “Hey, look at this!”  Farber's writing about film is an odd mixture of sublime insights, many opinions eccentric for their time which subsequent generations of critics have vindicated, and bouts of incoherent shouting.  Threading your way through the maze can be exhausting.

Farber's admirers will tell you that his incoherent passages are attempts to produce abstract literary equivalents of the non-verbal effects found in movies — which is academic nonsense of a far more objectionable type than Farber's.  His approach to movies was simply emotional and impressionistic, rather than analytical.  It's instructive to note that when Farber did try to describe images precisely he sometimes misremembered what he had “seen”.

An industry that seems to have concluded that its best hope is to
dramatize the comic-strip literature of an earlier and more vigorous
era is one whose fevers have finally destroyed its nerve. With rare
exceptions the pictures coming out of Hollywood today are the last
resorts of the gutless.

              — Larry McMurtry, foreward to Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood (Simon and Schuster)

This quote is from 1987.

The popular audience of the 20th Century never lost its appetite for the straightforward, heartfelt sentimentality of the Victorian era.  This was so much the case that all art forms which eschewed such sentimentality — painting, sculpture, concert music, opera, poetry and, for the most part, fiction — ceased to be popular arts at all.  Serious new works in all these forms were addressed to smaller and smaller elites.

20th-Century intellectuals, especially those associated with the academy, rejected frank sentimentality as a kind of outdated perversion, as something as unhealthy in its way as the supposed repression of sexuality in the Victorian era.  To be labeled a sentimental artist was as incompatible with intellectual prestige as being labeled a prude.

In the arts where “serious” intellectuals and the academy had no particular authority, such as movies and popular music, frank sentimentality continued on its merry way, commercial success with large audiences being considered sufficient compensation for intellectual disrepute.

When highbrow intellectual critics began to take movies seriously, they naturally tended to favor those films which relied least on sentimentality, or which rejected it to one degree or another.  This has resulted in a canon which reflects a skewed picture of popular movies.

It's all very silly, of course, and will someday be seen as one of the charming but lunatic quirks of 20th-Century intellectual fashion.  Meanwhile, however, it's interesting to imagine how the field of 20th-Century popular movies will look to future generations, who will have moved on to some other form of cultural myopia.

It may be, for example, that True Heart Susie will one day be considered as fine a film as Pandora's Box.  That Meet Me In St. Louis will be considered as fine a film as The Magnificent Ambersons.  That The Ghost and Mrs. Muir will be considered as fine a film as Vertigo.  That Titanic will be considered as fine as film as The Godfather, Part II.  There may even come a day when the Hollywood musical will be considered as cool as film noir.