Photo By Clive Coote

Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers' play lovers involved in a torrid affair in Match Point.

Woody Allen has been working his way back from a series of terrible, geriatric comedies like Curse of the Jade Scorpion by getting out of his movies as an actor and focusing on sophisticated, intelligent young people.

You could see the energy and directorial agility returning, but the problem has been, in recent comedies Anything Else and Melinda and Melinda, he too obviously wrote for and directed his actors (Jason Biggs and Will Ferrell, respectively) as if they were younger New York versions of himself. Both films had a dated, forced quality. (It didn't help that he upstaged Biggs with a juicy supporting role for himself as a teacher/would-be comedy writer.)

For Match Point, Allen made some radical changes. Most notably, this is a drama about class-consciousness and adultery that turns, a bit late in the game, into a thriller about murder. That's right, it's not a comedy.

But also Allen has made a clean break from his beloved Manhattan. This is set in contemporary London among the same kind of privileged English upper class so shrewdly dissected by another great American director, Robert Altman, in Gosford Park.

These are also themes Allen himself explored in Crimes and Misdemeanors, although here he benefits from not having to try to graft jokes onto his story's more tragic, Dostoyevskian elements.

Instead, he can explore the capricious vagaries of fate that the title metaphorically refers to. It's about how a tennis ball hitting the top of a net can fall on either side of the court with enormously different results. In a wonderfully ironic way, Allen explores that point visually as the film proceeds.

A reserved Jonathan Rhys-Meyers plays Chris, a tennis pro who by giving lessons to the wealthy young Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode) meets his sweet, cultured and slightly gangly sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer). She falls in love with Chris and they marry; he overlooks his lack of passion for her to enjoy the wealth her stuffy, aristocratic parents (Brian Cox and Penelope Wilton) offer him.

However, Chris is less able to overlook his attraction to sexy American would-be actress Nola (Scarlet Johansson), who is engaged to Tom. Maybe it's a class thing since they both seem like kept exotic animals to the Hewitt family. But then it's also a class thing that he can't leave Chloe. He likes the money and the power. That kind of tension can lead a man to drastic actions.

Match Point features the charming Johansson in an adult, femme-fatale role very different from her nicer, sweeter turns in Lost in Translation and In Good Company. With her husky and preternaturally mature voice, she must have seemed a natural for the part.

And she is very good until Allen pushes her beyond her comfort zone when Nola freaks out and starts screaming at Chris. That's where you realize she's not yet Anjelica Huston, who played a similar part in Crimes and Misdemeanors.

The standout in this film is Mortimer, who makes Chloe so disarmingly lovely and self-sacrificing toward Chris that you root for him to leave her because she deserves so much better.

Match Point suffers in that crucial acts -- and their outcomes -- seem more the result of the screenplay's necessities than of fate's cruelties. What ultimately happens here occurs because Allen has willed it, not because it seems like real life. In that way, the story's tragic elements don't fully take.

Still, there are beautiful moments that show Allen's undiminished directorial power, including a Shakespearean scene in which a murder victim returns to haunt her killer. That is a long way from comedy, and Allen's attempt to create some distance from his recent past is definitely a good decision. Grade: B-