Not since a copper-skinned, reptilian Mickey Rourke shirtlessly prowled its streets on a Harley in Wild Orchid has Rio de Janeiro received the picture-postcard treatment it does in Bruno Barreto's generic romantic roundelay Bossa Nova. Though Barreto's mild, twilight-age pairings couldn't be further removed from Rourke's silly erotic adventures, both films are tourist traps, using the city's lush topography and samba rhythms to advertise stories that aren't worth telling. For all its intimations to Rio, Bossa Nova is designed as a valentine to the director's wife, Amy Irving, who gives a pleasantly unassuming performance as a widowed English teacher in her early 40s. Resigned to living the rest of her life alone, she's surprised to find two students vying for her affections, one a middle-aged lawyer (Antônio Fagundes) and the other his much younger client (Alexandre Borges), a superstar soccer player. Meanwhile, her roommate (Drica Moraes) experiments with an online affair with an older man (Stephen Tobolowsky) who purports to be a SoHo artist. These and at least two other romantic pairings are brought together through increasingly manic setpieces, most involving the sort of simple misunderstandings that only seem to affect people in movies or sitcoms. Barreto is a veteran director capable of edgier work, from the sexually frank comedy Dona Flor And Her Two Husbands to the Costa-Gavras-style political thriller Four Days In September, but here he's lulled to sleep by the steady whir of plot mechanics. A featherweight tone and Rio's considerable exotic charm keep it agreeable, but Bossa Nova seems better suited to a travel agency than a movie theater.