Rebecca Hall, left, and Scarlett Johansson star in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

los angeles times / LIZ O. BAYLEN

Vicky Cristina Barcelona continues Woody Allen’s recent cinematic tour of Europe with another morality play, one that doesn’t fit his “romantic comedy” or “melodramatic thriller” mold. But Barcelona is likable, beautifully acted, scenic and sexy, ingredients that have been missing from his films since, oh, Everyone Says I Love You (1996).

Allen uses one of Europe’s most passionate cities as his crucible for a chatty essay on passion and love and the difference between them. Yeah, he’s been there before — the subject, not the city. But at least the novel setting allows him to do what he’s done before in novel ways.

Vicky (Rebecca Hall), a sensible American engaged to be married, is pals with Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), an impulsive sensualist. They spend a summer in Spain, where Vicky will finish up graduate work in Catalan art and culture, and on Antoni Gaudi, the architect famed for his playful, sensual undulating lines. Cristina, a failed would-be filmmaker, is just there for the experience and maybe a little romantic and artistic self-discovery.

They meet a too-sexy artist, Juan (Javier Bardem), whose approach to them says “player,” but whose candor defuses that. He wants them to come with him to Oviedo, spend a weekend, see the sights and sleep with him.

“Why not? Life is short. Life is dull. Life is full of pain. Why not do something special?”

Vicky is outraged. Cristina is intrigued. And when they make that trip — not under Juan’s conditions — they become caught up in the passion, the drama of his love life. He is divorced from a woman so passionate that she “stuck a knife in my chest.”

Separately, in quite roundabout ways, the women become members of love triangles involving Juan. We meet the ex, and Penelope Cruz and the Oscar-winning Bardem set off the sort of sparks you’d expect from Spain’s greatest screen couple. We also pick up Allen’s message, about following your passions, acting on impulse, or accepting that you shouldn’t.

It’s a movie filled with Allen-isms, the odd way so many of his actors start to sound and act like him when performing his lines, the highbrow poseur’s name-dropping (Scriabin, Gaudi, Miro). He makes wonderful use of this stunning city — the churches; the famed boulevard Las Ramblas; the antique, mountain-top Tibidabo amusement park; the Park Guell and Sagrada Familia; and other famous structures by Gaudi.

One very annoying thing about this movie is that much of the information — back story, advances in the plot — is conveyed by a never-seen narrator. Writerly, yes. But boring. Even a film as frankly sexual as this one can seem a little fusty and verbose in Allen’s hands.

It’s odd, too, how Allen seems instinctively to hire actors who are already playing some version of himself. Chris Messina was Allen-lite in Ira & Abby. Here, he’s the stammering, somewhat dull Doug, Vicky’s fiance, a man who promises her a life Juan never could deliver. And that’s the problem.

At this stage of the game, nobody goes to Woody Allen movies to be surprised. But every now and then he manages one. Vicky Cristina Barcelona is its own triangle, a movie from a director who’s done mostly comedies and neo-thrillers but that is neither, simply an old man’s mulling over love and passion and whether he or his characters make the right choice.

****Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, Rebecca Hall, Patricia Clarkson.

Rated: PG-13, contains adult themes, sexuality.

With his latest effort, Woody Allen fulfills a longtime European filmmaking fantasy1

Woody Allen says his latest film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, evokes the styles of European filmmakers he admires.

los angeles times / LIZ O. BAYLEN

HOLLYWOOD — The only place Woody Allen ever really wants to be is in his bed. “My spot on the bed is my spot in the world,” he explains. It’s where he watches baseball games, and reads, and where he writes, usually in the morning, because if he starts at night, he sometimes gets so excited he can’t go to sleep. It’s where the act of imagination is actually “pleasurable and I might go cast the people and see my characters come to life,” he says. “And I put the music in and I see the characters playing their scenes to the beautiful music behind them. You know, I get a kick out of that. And if nobody else does, that’s too bad.”

He sounds less defiant than resigned. Of all the major American artists, Allen has experienced one of the cruelest and most violent whipsaws of fortune, of tumbling from audience adulation to mass approbation. His solution to the vagaries of public estimation is to hold fast to the belief that none of it means anything. “When you’re a kid you think to yourself, ‘Fame and fortune and it’s going to be so exciting and …’ — but then you quickly find after three or four films, you find, ‘Wait a minute, the upside is nothing and the downside is nothing.’ The adulation of the multitudes or of the critics is an impersonal experience, and the negative feelings (from) people is an impersonal experience. The contract that the audience has with the person is you entertain us and we’ll show up. And that is as the contract should be.”

From the way Allen is talking, one would assume it’s the eve of the release of one of his misfires, the platoon of piffles including Celebrity and Anything Else that followed the public scandal of his 1992 breakup with Mia Farrow, the ugly accusations (denied and never proved) of child abuse and his later marriage (now 10 years running) to Farrow’s adopted daughter, then-22-year-old Soon-Yi Previn. In fact, he has made one of his most charming and funny movies in more than a decade, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the tale of two American young women (Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall) who, while summering in Spain, tumble into a relationship with an attractive, woman-loving artist (Javier Bardem) and his addled but delicious ex-wife (Penelope Cruz). The film, opening today, is a distillation on the vagaries of love with each woman struggling to find a stable foothold: the sexual adventuress who’s chronically dissatisfied (Johansson), the risk-averse would-be academic who’s in danger of squelching life’s passion (Hall) and the intoxicating, anarchic spirit (Cruz), who makes art great and life hell.

On a recent weekend, Allen, 72, was holed up in a hotel room, giving interviews — a rare burden for Allen, who used to be able to escape such routine experiences.

He is frailer than expected, in a pristine blue-checked shirt and chinos. He has totally gray hair, thick black glasses and skin that is curiously unwrinkled. One gets the sense that he would be happiest if everyone just left him alone to do his work. His manner is sweet but cagey.

Allen admits that going to Barcelona, Spain, to make a movie fulfilled his fantasy to one day be a European filmmaker. “I always wanted to make the kinds of films that I saw in the 1950s. The Truffaut films and the Goddard films and the Bergmans and Fellinis, and those are the films that always influenced my work. And I’ve always copied them and been influenced by them. Vicky Cristina Barcelona looks to me, when I see it, like one of those films.

The film, full of lovely images of the Gaudi buildings and old churches, is one of the happy accidents that have come from falling out of favor in America. Almost by necessity, he has been catapulted out of his familiar New York tropes, into London and now Barcelona, and the change of scenery appears to have been rejuvenating.

When a Spanish company, Mediapro, approached him with the proposition to finance a film in Barcelona, the writer-director basically thought, “Why not?” “Barcelona is a city that I can live in very easily,” he says. “If they mentioned some city in the Ukraine or the Sudan or something, I would have said no. But Barcelona is a beautiful, wonderful city.”

Most who see his new work will luxuriate in the comedy and in the possibility of spending 90 sun-drenched minutes in Barcelona. But, he says, his Spanish fable is actually “a very sad film.” This is, after all, Woody Allen’s universe, no matter what continent it takes place on, or how many laughs are to be had. Nobody gets what he or she wants.

“A relationship is like two sets of wires that are all over the place and they all have got to connect,” says Allen. He uses his fingers to demonstrate, gently touching one hand to the other. “If one wire doesn’t connect, then it doesn’t work. It’s like there’s one thing missing. The salt is missing from the diet. It’s a small thing, but it ruins you. You die.”