Allen rouses hopeful murmurs of a return to form with this largely inoffensive piece of fluff, featuring his current flavour of the month in the shape of Scarlett Johansson.Financed in part by the city of Barcelona, the film amply repays their investment with a seemly travelogue of Gaudis and Ramblas. This is overlaid with a floating narrator, presumably purporting to be faux-naif and sardonic in the style of John Hurt's weighty tones from Lars von Trier's Dogville and Manderlay, but frequently ending up coming across as merely gormless and therefore not acting as a sufficient counterpoint to the impressionability of the two American leads, led along by Javier Bardem's languid libertine.
What we have on display here is familiar territory, with sensuous, unstable, wordly Europeans pulling orderly, conservative Americans in their tow. Allen may stay behind the camera for once, but is sure to project himself into the characters of - as his alter ego - Rebecca Hall's nervy and nebbish Vicky, and, as a wish-fulfilment exercise, Bardem's all-conquering Juan Antonio. We sail sleepily and pleasantly through Allen's usual landscape of inexplicably wealthy creative thinkers until Penelope Cruz enters and finally shakes up the torpor with an abrasive and pyrotechnic turn as Juan Antonio's suicidal ex-wife, albeit also as a broad stereotype of the hysterically passionate Latin.
Still, the characters remain likeable and the pattest of conclusions are avoided. Viewers fearing a repeat of the pontificating triteness of Whit Stillman's Barcelona (1994) may end up breathing a sigh of relief.
6/10
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