Why don’t glamourous hotties ever fall madly in love with nice, well-mannered, hard-working boys? Why are they forever falling in love with over-muscled, mean-spirited, brutes who are so clearly up to no good?
This topic has been debated extensively in my hostel room by my friends, all of whom are nice, well-mannered, hard-working boys.
However, the most insightful take on this eternal question came not from my nice-but-angst-ridden hosteller friends, but from one of their moms, a trained psychologist with a Ph.D. in Jungian thought. The way she saw it, the psyche, consciously or otherwise, always seeks a balance between animus with anima, yin with yang. The elements need to be in proportion.Vicky Cristina Barcelona illustrates this thought. Watch it before you read this post, if you care about suspense. I will give away elements of the plot.
Vicky has her life sorted. She is a serious, hard-working, responsible, well-educated graduate student. She is engaged to a serious, hard-working, responsible, well-employed banker/ lawyer. They will get married when she earns her Masters degree. They are buying a nice house together in a pleasant New York suburb. They are thinking about tennis lessons. Soon they will buy a Volvo and have beautiful children who will get above average grades. Vicky is well on her way to yuppie nirvana, the only nirvana she has ever wanted. That is, until she falls in love.
The man she falls in love with is Juan Antonio, a spontaneous, passionate, intense, expressive, incandescent Catalan painter. She isn’t looking for love, she isn’t even open to being wooed. But her yang senses Juan Antonio’s yin, her earth needs Juan Antonio’s fire. Together, their chi comes into balance, magic happens, and Vicky becomes more vividly alive than she has ever been. Vicky's story is at the emotional core of the movie. She still is the girl who wants to be a suburban mom. But she needs to deal with the depth of her feelings for Juan Antonio. Is this a fleeting infatuation? Or profound love? Or is profound love a fleeting infatuation?
The film’s other emotional core is Juan Antonio’s marriage with Maria Elena, another spontaneous, passionate, intense, expressive, incandescent Catalan painter. Juan Antonia and Maria Elena live, breathe, sleep and dream together. They work together so intensely that their art, their styles, are indistinguishable. They are one mind, one soul, inseparable despite inhabiting distinct bodies. Therefore, their love is dysfunctional. They are too alike. Together they have too much yin, too much fire, their chi is not in balance.Juan Antonio and Maria Elena need another element, someone who is not like them, to balance the chi in their marriage.
That element comes, like a breath of fresh air, in the form of Vicky’s college friend Christina, a film maker bored with her own work and casting around for new experiences. What could be a more exciting new experience than these passionate Spanish artists? It works out, fire needs air. But does air need fire?Vicky Cristina Barcelona feels like a classic Woody Allen film, which is great for someone like me who has long been a fan of Manhattan and Annie Hall. Woody Allen's characters do sometimes come across as one-dimensional, like vehicles to make his point rather than as messy, real, flesh and blood people. That generally doesn't happen here. British actress Rebecca Hall is appropriately stilted as Vicky, and Scarlett Johansson easily gets into the skin of the beautiful, bored and self-centered Cristina. But the real-life couple who make this movie are Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. They bring so much guts, gumption and messy passion to their roles as Juan Antonio and Maria Elena that it's impossible not to be carried away.
We watched this DVD shortly after Live Flesh, a Pedro Almodovar film which also had a superb Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. That cast, the Spanish setting, and the broad open-ended questions about love and the meaning of life give this film a delicious Woody Allen meets Pedro Almodovar feeling. It is great fun. Mind it!
1 comment:
I've had some feedback on this post. It is set up with a tantalizing question - “why don’t glamourous hotties ever fall madly in love with nice, well-mannered, hard-working boys?” - which is then left mostly unanswered. To set that right, here is my take on the reason why glamourous hotties don’t fall in love with the nice, well-mannered, hard-working guys.
Basically, if a hottie and a nice boy got together, as a couple they would have too much yin. Their chi wouldn’t be balanced.
Actually, “glamourous hotties” isn’t quite right. This theory is essentially about girls whose energy is predominantly yin, as opposed to girls whose energy is a mixture of both yin and yang. Girls who are mainly yin, seek out boys who are mainly yang; gentle, caring girls who want to please, naturally seek out tough macho jocks, who want to dominate. Conversely, girls with a fair bit of yang in their spirit seek out boys with a yin in their spirit; ambitious, spunky, go-getting girls seek out gentle, caring, respectful boys. Unfortunately, and almost inevitably, the gentle boys will see the jocks as over-muscled, mean-spirited brutes.
Finding empirical evidence for this theory, say in the celeb world, is not easy. Women celebs, even the very overtly feminine babes, need a lot of yang ambition and spunk to become celebs. That sample is systematically skewed. Probably easier, and more fun, to point out relevant examples among our friends when we meet in person :)
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