Woody Allen finds new inspiration in Spain

Here's a pickup line for you: "Life is short. Life is dull. Life is full of pain."

That's how Javier Bardem, as a painter named Juan Antonio, propositions a pair of young Americans in a Barcelona boite one night. Come with me for the weekend, he suggests to the two girlfriends, prescribing an antidote to his bleak existential assessment of things. We'll laugh, we'll dine, we'll drink, we'll make love. Why not?

Well, it doesn't quite happen that way. But it's to Woody Allen's credit - writer and director of the lovely, loping Vicky Cristina Barcelona - and to that of Bardem, and Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson as Vicky and Cristina, respectively, that this crucial, and perhaps improbable scene, works so convincingly. If it hadn't, the whole triangular - no, make that rectangular - tale of love and seduction, friendship and art, tapas and vino, would have fallen apart.

The fourth constituent in Allen's balmy romantic reverie is Penelope Cruz. Although her character, Maria Elena, doesn't show up until midway into the story, Cruz is crazy, explosive, wonderful as Juan Antonio's ex. A fellow artist, Maria Elena reenters Juan Antonio's life just as Johansson's Cristina has moved into it - and moved into his house as well.

Smoking, shouting, practically shooting off sparks, Cruz spreads a wildfire sexuality across Allen's sunny tableau of Catalan country picnics and scenic Barcelona ramblings. Cruz and Bardem, who have a history together - the erotically charged 1992 Spanish import, Jamón, Jamón, and Pedro Almodovar's 1997 gem, Live Flesh - turn what could have been a cartoon rendering of hot-blooded Latin passion into a seriously unpredictable relationship.

Johansson, in her third Allen picture, plays a boldly impetuous but adrift woman ricocheting in and out of affairs. She's the polar opposite of her best friend from college, Vicky. And the English actress Hall, who anchors the movie with a quiet sadness, is terrific as this I've-mapped-out-my-life American, engaged to be married to a financial guy back in New York (Chris Messina). Vicky is in Barcelona for the summer, doing research for her thesis paper on Catalan identity.

"Sometimes she gets on my nerves with her crackpot love affairs," Vicky says about Cristina at one point, but it's Vicky's love affair - or thwarted affair - with Juan Antonio that gives Allen's movie its emotional resonance.