Vicky Cristina Barcelona 4K 2008

If you’ve been beaming all day at the sparkling splendor of the Christmas tree and smiling broadly at this unquestionably blissful day, perhaps you’re just in a very good mood today. But if you’re strolling around the room in awe, waddling like a chicken on one leg, and quietly humming to yourself the catchy tune “Barcelona-Barcelona” that’s stuck in your head, it’s likely that something incredibly beautiful has captured your heart. If, on top of that, you’re standing among tourists at the airport, looking around to figure out where on earth you’ve ended up, and frantically trying to remember how a cold winter evening in Moscow suddenly turned into sunny Spain, then you definitely watched Woody Allen’s new film yesterday.

Because “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” is the most delightful, charming, and utterly cinephile-friendly entertainment of the season—a sterile syringe of cinematic joy administered intravenously. Cinema at its purest, based—strictly speaking—on the desire to make the person on the other side of the screen so happy that everything around them seems so amazing and so beautiful. Here, there’s a kilogram of that undiluted happiness.

To follow up “Cassandra’s Dreams”—a film that was a crisis in every sense—and all that dreary Dostoevskian gloom of recent British films with a movie as light as a feather, as uplifting as a giant cheesecake, and truly inspiring—you really do have to be a bit of a genius. Still, Woody Allen—as before and as always—miraculously extracts a few precious moments from utter emptiness, moments that stick in your memory instantly. Plot: Two curious American women named Vicky and Christina (just like in the worst jokes—a blonde and a brunette, a dreamer and a career woman)—arrive in Barcelona, meet a charming Spanish artist, and find themselves drowning in eagerly indulged romantic transgressions. One tries unsuccessfully to make sense of it all (“What did that kiss mean?”), while the other—with chaste determination—throws herself headlong into the thick of it. At some point, a zany woman appears in the plot—the good-natured Penélope Cruz in a fit of hysteria—and everything gets completely tangled up; the love triangle first turns into a quadrangle, and then into a parallelepiped.

Actress Rebecca Hall, bewildered by the ambiguity of love, is quite pretty. Scarlett Johansson, with “faded foam on her youthful lips,” is still gorgeous even though she plays a frivolous airhead. Bardem in a red shirt is so goofy that you wouldn’t recognize him as last year’s killer with the gas canister. The overall impression is that all these exceptionally pleasant and beautiful people are acting out the most joyful orgasm in world cinema. And if we can coin the term “great little films” to contrast with the “great big films” (2001: A Space Odyssey, Citizen Kane, There Will Be Blood, etc.), then “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” is a great little film.

In the end, nothing turns out either good or bad. Because nothing really ends. Meanwhile, the speakers are still blaring just as cheerfully: “Oh! Barcelona! Oh! Barcelona!” And in that moment of exceptional significance and tenderness, it feels as though there’s no better movie in the world.