Movies from the Heart—Vicky Cristina Barcelona

I think one of the reasons I’ve always loved movies is that they’ve been a way to travel when travel wasn’t possible. Growing up in Iowa, movies were my window onto the world—I could imagine what New York was like, what Texas was like, what Paris was like, what China was like… what the world outside my narrow life was like.

And remember 2020? When the pandemic sent us into about two years of lockdown? Movies were that travel outlet that I couldn’t have in real life. Movies helped me leave my house and go… well, anywhere.

Because movies don’t just take you to a city—as if you were a tourist—they take you inside a culture, a mindset, a whole new world.

This week I want to look at a film that even has another world in its title—Vicky Cristina Barcelona, by Woody Allen. Take a look at the trailer for the film.

Is this just your run-of-the-mill triangle love story? Well, not really. Cuz it’s a quadrangle love story!

At the center is Juan Antonio, who has a tempestuous relationship with Maria Elena that has gone on for some time. And into the picture come two young women—Vicky and Cristina—who also fall for Juan Antonio in different ways. The romance of this film absolutely sparkles.

In some ways the film is almost like a documentary on different ways to love—so an interesting idea on which to build a film. And it’s different—unique—in how it tells its story. One of the ways it accomplishes this is with the addition of a narrator. So as you’re seeing the various characters and story points unfold, you have a narrator who is NOT in the story, NOT one of the characters, commenting on the story, commenting on the characters—like a narrator narrating a fairy tale. Or the narrator in a Victorian novel.

This narration gives the film a texture that is different—I mean, it’s really different. I think it totally works in this film but I doubt it could work in most cases. I mention this because if you’re thinking of using narration in your film, do NOT try this method. Woody Allen could get away with it because he’s Woody Allen and he doesn’t have to answer to a studio. But unless you’re your own auteur, narration like this will simply not fly.

And even in this film—where I actually liked the narration and thought it added to the film—if you imagine the film without the narration it still holds together.

Narration is tricky and, generally, it’s seen as a crutch. An executive will say about a writer, “Oh, he couldn’t just tell the story so he had to use narration.” The point being, the best scripts generally tell the story without having to resort to narration. I mention this to point out that even if you’re drawn to narration, it has to really be integral to the telling of your story.

Next week we’ll look at another film that uses narration in a different way—Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Copyright © Diane Lake

22Sep24

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