This movie has one of Woody Allen's favorite devices: the appearance, half-way through a movie, of a character who has been much-talked-about for the entire first half, but has remained unseen. For example, Wallace Shawn as "Jeremiah," Diane Keaton's sexually-superpowered ex-husband, in Manhattan; or the uncle played by Tom Wilkinson in Cassandra's Dream. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Penelope Cruz plays Javier Bardem's ex-wife, but the twist when she actually shows up is no twist at all: she is *exactly* as crazy and beautiful and violent as everything said about her up to this point. The scene is wonderful for the way, without any dialogue, Allen captures Scarlett Johansson's feeling upon seeing Cruz: oh shit, there's no way I can compete with this woman. And then the way the film resolves this situation is similarly wonderful.
Rebecca Hall is channeling Mia Farrow here, as the mousy, neurotic woman who is suspiciously good at "getting what she wants" (that's my reading, following Hannah and Her Sisters and Husbands and Wives). She is just sexy enough to be believable, and her nervousness is easily its own equivalent of the volatile energy of Cruz.
What I like about this movie: it takes an interesting situation, and slowly unfolds it through several developments and a small twist. One could compare it to Bergman's last film, Sarabande, in the way that a few characters are walked-through complications in their desires, without any big action or false resolutions. Husbands and Wives would be an excellent reference within Allen's ouevre.
Whether one likes this film or not probably depends on your tolerance for the voice-over narration. To my ears, it was pure Flaubert: ambiguous, falsely even-handed, arrogant, but completely banal. Anyone who tells you the narration was "obtrusive" is just telling you they haven't read Madame Bovary.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment