In the end, banalities sink this 'City'

Remember ''L'Auberge Espagnole," the saucy 2002 foreign-language drama about exchange-student roommates falling in and out of one another's beds in Barcelona? Cesc Gay's ''In the City" is like hanging out with their screwed-up older siblings.

The new film wants to be a subtle, penetrating look at a group of 30-somethings and the lies they tell one another. Sometimes it achieves that aim. And sometimes ''more mature" just means ''duller."

Barcelona may be one of Europe's most beautiful cities, but you'd never know it from this movie: With admirable perversity, ''In the City" unfolds in darkened apartments and trendy restaurants, at art galleries and in avant-garde theaters.

Unlike ''Espagnole," this isn't a turista film, and that makes sense. These characters are too busy living their lives to take in the sights.

In fact, the characters are too busy living secret lives to have any sort of perspective on themselves. Irene (Monica Lopez) appears to be a chic yuppie working mother, with an adoring daughter and husband (Chisco Amado), neither of whom is aware of her growing crush on a female photographer (Aurea Marquez). Tomas (Alex Brendemuhl), a professor, is carrying on a hidden affair with Ana (Miranda Makaroff), his student and the 16-year-old niece of his best friend Mario (Eduard Fernandez). Mario's secret is that he knows his actress girlfriend Sara (Vicenta N'Dongo) is seeing another man; he contemplates revenge sex with a waitress (Leonor Watling) and nurses his misery like an abscessed tooth.

As for Sofia (Maria Pujalte), a single bookstore clerk and compulsive liar, her secret life is the depressing reality she won't admit to her friends, let alone herself. In Sofia's head, a one-night stand with a married French businessman (Eric Bonicatto) becomes a relationship, one with more appeal than the genuine romance offered by Andres (Jordi Sanchez), a schlumpy, good-hearted teacher.

Sofia is easily the most irritating person here, and that's a compliment in the context of this muted, cautious morality play.

Pujalte gives the part a headstrong spin; Sofia blusters neurotically about her newfound happiness, but the rest of the gang knows her too well to buy it. They also like her well enough to let her keep playing the drama queen, and God knows the movie needs one. But the director also hints that we use our more melodramatic friends to divert attention from our own problems.

Are there truths here? Plenty; there's not an adult walking the earth who doesn't keep a secret self tucked away where others hopefully can't see it.

''In the City" delicately charts the emotional toll exacted by such efforts -- it's intrigued by the way social groups dissolve into collections of isolated individuals, each spinning sadly in his or her own orbit while presenting a false face to the others. The movie's the anti-''Friends"; these people aren't there for you.

For all that, Gay and fellow screenwriter Tomas Aragay have nuanced the juice right out of their own movie. ''In the City" consists of one banal veiled conversation after another, and all that social repression flatlines the proceedings. Toward the end, when one of the characters actually speaks his mind to his significant other, you feel like clapping the guy on the back and buying him a drink.

Still later, when another of the friends suddenly sees where the lies have taken her and bursts into tears, you're not sure what to think. Is she distraught at her hypocrisy? Or because she'll have to give it up? Or both? ''In the City" is too enraptured with its own discretion to let on.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.