Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Rating:

* * * * *

Verdict:

A joyful, sun-soaked and sexy return to form.

With the clever but ponderous

Match Point

and the profoundly unfunny pastiche

Scoop

, Woody Allen seemed like a man who had run out of steam. But his newest, a love letter not just to the city of the title but to love itself, is a triumphant return to form. It is also, not incidentally, the most purely entertaining and unabashedly sexy film of his career.

Vicky and Cristina, gal pals in Barcelona for the summer, are temperamental polar opposites. We learn a lot about them in the opening frames because Allen has recourse to a voiceover narration (the device doesn't grate because the behaviour it describes, in the tones of a TV wildlife documentary, is so damn interesting): Vicky (Hall), serious and engaged to a young lawyer back home, is working on her masters thesis; Cristina (Johansson) just wants to have fun.

And fun is on offer from Juan Antonio (Bardem), a smouldering hunk of an artist who looks lecherously at the new arrivals and invites them away for the weekend. "We'll eat well, we'll drink good wine, well make love," he says. "Who exactly is going to make love?" asks Vicky. "Hopefully the three of us," he replies, wide-eyed.

Thus the pair embark on an emotional education which is pure Woody Allen in the sense that it is tinged with a kind of knowing melancholy about the improbability of love without pain. But what's new here is that most unlikely of things in an Allen film: a rich summery joy.

Much of that derives from the almost edibly gorgeous camerawork of cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe who shot the wonderful and contrasting

The Sea Inside

and

The Others:

the film is, in a sense, a pastoral idyll, even in its urban settings. But the unselfconscious and fluid ensemble work is as good as he has captured. Hall, daughter of the great English theatre director Peter, is marvellous as the neurotic Vicky but the film's real joy is Cruz, as Juan

Antonio's tempestuously jealous almost-ex.

This is the work of a mature artist - so confident that at one point he can even fade down the punchline of a joke. If you lost patience with Woody Allen some time ago, here is the film to restore your faith.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Scarlett Johansson, Penelope Cruz, Rebecca Hall, Javier Bardem

Director:

Woody Allen

Running time:

96 mins

Rating:

M

Screening:

Albany, St Lukes, Bridgeway, Lido, Rialto, Sylvia Park, Queen St, Highland Park, Matakana from Boxing Day