The heat between Javier Bardem and Scarlett Johansson is obvious in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

AP / Victor Bello

When Javier Bardem first notices Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson in Woody Allen’s new film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, his penetrating gaze is a wolfish one that has seldom been seen in Allen’s screen work.

It is not as though his films haven’t acknowledged male lust; they are steeped in longing. But that desire is usually camouflaged by layers of shyness and nervous banter. Pretty women like Hall and Johansson, who play two Americans vacationing in Barcelona, are to be admired and wooed with smart conversation, but they are not raw meat to be pounced on and devoured.

Allen’s typical alter egos are variations of the neurotic nebbish he has so often played. Brainy, not brawny, they seduce with charm and wit, not physical magnetism.

One reason movie critics heaped such lavish praise on his movies during the Annie Hall period was that so many of them were fuzzy-haired brainiacs like Allen, living more in the mind than in the body. Allen, like his homely Hollywood forerunner Fred Astaire, is a profoundly reassuring role model for male nerds of all ages. Despite his lack of sex appeal, he often gets the girl, and it can even be Julia Roberts.

When in his work have you seen a hookup in which a hunk and a babe make eye contact and fall into ravenous lovemaking? Allen’s disdain for the jock-cheerleader ideal was encapsulated in the famous scene in Annie Hall in which his character, Alvy Singer, approaches a golden couple on the street, remarks that they look happy and asks how they account for it.

The young woman replies, “I’m very shallow and empty and have nothing of interest to say.” Her companion adds, “I’m exactly the same way.”

Bardem has bedroom eyes and is sort of a hunk. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, his character, Juan Antonio, a painter, eventually has his way with both Vicky (Hall), a straitlaced student of Catalan culture who is engaged to a yuppie go-getter, and Cristina (Johansson), a restless, moody aspiring artist with a talent for photography.

The racing erotic pulse of Vicky Cristina Barcelona is an encouraging development for Allen, who, for all the talk about relationships in his films, views arguing couples more as self-absorbed therapy patients than as lovers. If his dialogue weren’t so witty, you’d beg them to shut up.

That view changed decisively in Match Point, from 2005. There, the illicit lovers played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Johansson were portrayed as hungry young animals in a movie that aspired to be a film noir on the order of The Postman Always Rings Twice. But as their sculptural lips locked, there was no sign of a passion strong enough to incite murder, because for all of his sleek good looks, Rhys Meyers was still a cold fish.

Despite the sensual loosening up of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, it still follows the romantic pattern of all of Allen’s movies.

The male protagonist is often older (sometimes a lot older) than the women he pursues. (In real life Bardem is 39; Johansson and Hall are in their 20s.) He clings to the role of teacher and guide, flaunting his wit, erudition and self-deprecating humor. His love interests run to childlike eccentrics who are relatively unthreatening. The young Diane Keaton was a girlish neurotic kook, Mia Farrow a waifish tomboy and Mariel Hemingway, in Manhattan, a schoolgirl.

Juan Antonio, in addition to having erotic magnetism, is a suave bon vivant and knowledgeable Barcelona tour guide. Most importantly, he is a serious artist, an exalted status in Allen’s universe that puts him on the same plane as the professors, intellectuals and filmmakers who inhabit his films.

Among this elite, lovers lacking intellectual curiosity, the gift of high-culture gab and a post-Freudian vocabulary are no better than peasants. Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the first Woody Allen film to infuse this lofty world with serious body heat.