Love is in the air…don’t cough

Love is a funny thing.  You can’t explain it.  You can’t justify it.  It just happens.  And when you’re lucky, it happens in explosions of emotion and passion.  (We’re talking romantic love, here.  Not the love you have for your great-uncle or a late-night Mighty Pack.) If you can find it, it can change your life for the better and for the worse.  The better, in that it makes you happier to be alive; the worse in that it makes you reconsider what it means to be alive. In the end, so long as you’re happier than you are not, it’s a good thing.  Doesn’t mean it’s not also hard.  And it doesn’t mean hard difficult isn’t good.

I don’t know about you, but when I think of love and all its complications, I don’t think of Woody Allen.  When I think of psychotherapists and inexplicable internal conflict, I think of Woody Allen.  (Also, clarinets.) Perhaps this is the reason it somehow makes sense for Allen to have made a movie so clearly devoted to the turmoil and pleasures of love and romance.  “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” currently playing at the North Park Theatre on Hertel Avenue, is a refreshing take from the consummate neurotic New Yorker.  The film does not star Allen, though it was written and directed by him.  At least we don’t have to watch him make out with Scarlet Johansson again.

Johansson, who starred in Allen’s “Match Point,” a drama which was also a bit of a departure and which also didn’t star its director, plays Vicky (or is it Cristina? I don’t know or care).  Her friend, the other one, and her travel to glorious Barcelona for a summer of fun and exploration.  The two quickly meet a Spanish romantic who after literally two minutes of knowing the girls offer to whisk them away for the weekend for art, travel and sex.  Johansson’s character is thrilled at the prospect of spontaneous fun, while her friend is cautious and insulted.  Blah blah blah, hilarity ensues, roles are reversed and lots of wine and lovin’ change everybody’s minds on the way they see life.  There’s also a gunshot.

You have to hand it to Allen here.  You can enjoy this film on many levels, from its spectacularly lush Spanish landscapes to its beautiful acoustic guitar music, to the sight of Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz making out.  Whatever your fancy, you walk away fully reminded of the intricate nature of love and life.  Are we better for falling in love, head over heels, so much that we throw the rest of life’s commitments out the window?  Is it all about passion and fire?  How about the other side of the coin, where the beauty of security and stability brings two people together for the long haul.  Is one better than the other, and who are we to doubt that either can’t be fulfilling?  Also, how many more times am I going to ask rhetorical and hypothetical questions like I’m Carrie Bradshaw?  (One more:) At the end of the day, what is love anyway?

Posted by on 08/21 at 10:54 AM