If Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona is about anything to be sure, it’s about lips.

Juan Antonio describes Cristina’s lips as her main attraction. As Vicky transforms into the image of Cristina, the camera focuses on Vicky’s lips, so similar to Cristina’s. Maria Elena makes her entrance; lips pursed sensuously around one cigarette after another. Lips lock in kisses at every opportunity.

I doubt the city of Barcelona would be pleased by this. They approached Allen and offered him funds to shoot a movie in their city, hoping, I imagine, for a portrait as rapturous as Allen’s love letter to Manhattan. Maybe they forgot that Manhattan is the product of a different era, and a different Allen.

Other than those lips – belonging fetchingly to Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, and Penelope Cruz – not much stands out, certainly nothing about Barcelona, and definitely nothing as picture postcard memorable as Allen and Diane Keaton seated in silhouette beneath the 59th Street Bridge with Allen describing his city as “a knockout.”

Allen has lost contact with the creative inspirations of those days in the late '70s, a time as long ago as Barcelona is far away. He has lost his touch for character and dialog. The cast, rounded out by Javier Bardem, has that sketchbook feel of stick figures diagrammed to go through the motions of romantic coupling and uncoupling. But Allen forgot to add flesh and nuance.

Allen seemingly thought Johansson’s Cristina should start from her cynically aimless Rebecca from Ghost World and then grow up. But grow how? And to where? Allen doesn’t seem to have thought that far ahead.

About the best thing I can say about Bardem is that his work here never stirred up memories of Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men. The worst thing I can say is that I wish I’d been constantly reminded of Anton Chigurh; at least that character possessed a genuine sense of mystery.