For the first time since he was in his 2006 picture “Scoop,” Woody Allen has given himself a part in his next film, which has the working title of “The Bop Decameron” and is due to start filming in Rome in July. The Decameron is the name of Boccacio’s erotic 14th-century stories, often made into film, most famously by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1971 and also by Fellini/de Sica et al for the 1962 "Boccacio 70." Alec Baldwin, Penelope Cruz, Judy Davis, Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page and Roberto Benigni star. Thus, year in, year out, the director pays his tithe to the gods of cinema, this time around surely especially buoyed by the resounding and well-deserved success of his multi-actored, multi-period “Midnight in Paris.”
Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona runs from promising to intriguing to agreeably incoherent to disagreeably incoherent to utter anarchy.
A little frustrating as film, yes, but one might say it successfully mirrors the pathway of romance. It certainly mirrors the pathway of the volcanic marriage of artists Maria and Juan Antonio (Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem), a disturbed, bickering couple for whom “shooting from the hip” can have uncomfortable meanings. The film traces the sensuous adventures of two American college grads Vicky and Christina (Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson) as they summer in Spain and become romantically entangled with the couple.
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