Mr. 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 Mr. Allen, living more in the mind than in the body. Mr. 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? Mr. 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.”

Mr. 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 (Ms. Hall), a straitlaced student of Catalan culture who is engaged to a yuppie go-getter, and Cristina (Ms. Johansson), a restless, moody aspiring artist with a talent for photography.

His seductions follow his initial suggestion that the three have sex together, an offer that the prudish Vicky rejects. All that is shown of each encounter is some moderately passionate kissing before the camera retreats. As always in a Woody Allen production, what happens in the bedroom stays in the bedroom.

“Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” like many of his films, has antecedents in European cinema. Here the obvious forerunner is François Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim,” but instead of two men and a woman Mr. Allen gives us three women and a man. Penélope Cruz plays the third woman, Maria Elena, Juan Antonio’s volatile ex-wife, a fellow painter who crashes back into his life while he is living with Cristina. Ms. Cruz’s spitfire, who suggests both Jeanne Moreau’s Catherine in “Jules and Jim” and Marion Cotillard’s Édith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose,” is casually bisexual. Cristina, Maria Elena and Juan Antonio share an interlude as a ménage à trois.

Maria Elena is also the hot-blooded European version of the dangerous, headstrong women played in earlier Allen films by Judy Davis. The difference between Maria Elena and Ms. Davis’s characters in “Husbands and Wives” and “Deconstructing Harry” indicates that Mr. Allen views European sexuality as more advanced and sophisticated than that of uptight America. Where Ms. Davis’s women are bitter, frustrated neurotics, Ms. Cruz’s Maria Elena, for all her gun-waving craziness, is tempestuous, free-spirited and sexually uninhibited. It is the difference between Joan Crawford and Sophia Loren.

The racing erotic pulse of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” is an encouraging development for Mr. 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 Ms. 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 his sleek good looks Mr. Rhys Meyers was still a cold fish.

Despite the sensual loosening up of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” it still follows the romantic pattern of all Mr. Allen’s movies. The male protagonist is often older (sometimes a lot older) than the women he pursues. (In real life Mr. Bardem is 39; Ms. Johansson and Ms. 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 important, he is a serious artist, an exalted status in Mr. 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.