Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the story of two footloose women who travel to Barcelona for the summer and go through various relationship dramas. The scenery is gorgeous: beautiful Spanish cities, beautiful people, beautiful clothing and art. The script is good, the plot carries you along. So it’s worth watching.

To enjoy the movie, I had to get over some niggling annoyances. The two women are adults for whom money grows on trees. There’s never once a reference to how either one of them make their livelihood. In addition, they mainly seem to be appendages of the men in their lives. The movie focuses so strongly on the reactions of the women to these men that it starts to feel like a high school drama. This makes the characters rather flat. Finally, the women seem to be incredibly tolerant of Juan Antonio’s blatant objectification of them. He is attracted to them at first sight because they are model gorgeous. Well, that’s original! You’d think these two women would have had enough of that, by now, but apparently they are still easily seduced by someone with a shallow attraction based on appearances.

The movie is a fantasy. You have to do a good job of suspending disbelief if you want to enjoy it. It helps a lot that the setting is so beautiful, the acting is good, the plot is fresh. Too bad the characters are so unreal and superficial.

BTW did anyone else think that two of the actors in this movie bear a striking resemblance to two of the actors from Grey’s Anatomy? With his two-day beard, Javier Bardem resembles Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Denny Duquette from Grey’s) and Scarlett Johansson resembles Katherine Heigl (Izzie Stevens from Grey’s). Initially it felt like a bizarro universe spin-off of Grey’s Anatomy. I wonder if it was deliberate.