An encyclopedic comedy that balances love in the time of Freud with neuroses at the dawn of psychoanalysis, “Unconscious” wastes what seems like unlimited comedic license on a routine jog through history’s strip mall.

Set in 1913 Barcelona, this 2004 Spanish import which starts a run today at Cinema Village, has all the energy of “Amelie” and all the whimsical-turned-serious characters of “Love Me If You Dare” — not to mention a parade of other French comedies — but what it sorely lacks is the propulsion that kept those films surging forward. The energy created by a performance, a mystery, or a directing style cannot be underestimated, and while those French predecessors had that spark at their center, “Unconscious” seems to limp along, cheerful but relatively empty.

What the film does have going for it is an intriguing intellectual conceit: that smart people embarking on a Sherlock Holmeslike mission are able to solve just about every mystery except the one that concerns what’s rumbling around in their own minds — ironically, the only mystery that really matters.

The episode starts in hysterics and ends in sexual confusion, beginning with Alma (Leonor Watling) arriving home one day to discover her husband running out the door. Don’t call the cops, he says, and Alma panics that he has left her forever, rushing to call over Salvador (Luis Tosar), her husband’s brother as well as her sister’s (Nuria Prims) husband. Calm and composed, Salvador says Alma’s husband surely left because she is nine months pregnant, and he is terrified of the responsibilities facing him. But Salvador is quick to say that he would never have abandoned her — even early on, it’s clear that Salvador is in love with the wrong sister.

In a monologue at the top of the film, we are reminded that these are the glory days of Dr. Sigmund Freud, the short time in which the rules of sexuality and science were being wildly rewritten by a liberating wave of psychoanalysis. In a sense, it was an emboldening era, one in which a new class of academics rose to power and re-constructed the psychology handbook (note that Alma’s old-school father is a neurologist while she is a fan of Freud). So perhaps it is not surprising when Alma decides to uncover her husband’s mystery by herself.

She starts with all he has left behind: an academic thesis about “hysteria and female sexuality” that documents the stories of four mystery women — an actress with a persecution complex, a psychotic woman who tried to murder her husband, a woman with a sexual identity crisis, and a stranger who has discovered a terrible secret of her past. It’s the perfect, self-reflexive MacGuffin for a most selfaware film, one that is regularly framed by director Joaquin Oristrell — best known for such contemporary urban comedies as “Off Key” — with the proscenium of a theater stage to highlight the melodrama for the farce that it is. The more Alma digs for the truth about her husband, the more she discovers the unexpected lies surrounding Salvador, her father, her sister, and herself.

Before long, these academic (and pretentious) characters who bow at the feet of Freud are making their own Freudian slips, and the fun of “Unconscious” is in watching them betray their aura of intellectual superiority.

Salvador, long before he ever lets Alma in on his emotions, unknowingly picks up his brother’s fertility statue, dropping it as Alma tells him what it is. Alma bursts into a spontaneous case of hiccups whenever she experiences a moment of silence around her father. When Salvador overhears his wife describing how well endowed he is, his excitement is shattered when she says it makes sex painful — and in the same conversation Alma whispers to her sister about the nature of oral sex, leading sis to give her cigarette a double take.

Early on, these asides are somewhat subtle, but they accelerate into a rapid-fire marathon of the Freud oeuvre. Male roommates turn out to have latent homosexual tendencies, men and women trade clothes in a scene that allows them to be even more honest about their feelings, a swooning man tries to hypnotize his lover only to accidentally hypnotize himself into the man she always wanted. Sex is interrupted by conversation, conversation by sex, and a final flurry of revelations casts all the love in this universe — whether between friends, siblings, or parents — as a guise, a cover for some other reality or agenda.

“Unconscious” boasts the oldfashioned, up-tempo whirligig zaniness of such American classics as “Bringing Up Baby.” But that film has two actors in Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn who exude the charisma and chemistry that Mr. Tosar and Ms. Watling deliberately don’t — they’re both masking their desires, you see — as well as a dose of the inventiveness and spontaneity that is woefully missing from this packed-to-thebrim bout of references.

As one becomes all too conscious of what “Unconscious” is up to, the film is rendered nearly benign. It’s a bullet-point comedy, a jerky series of psychoanalytical gaffes, lacking the connecting tissue to merge the subconscious humor with our mind’s more discerning left and right hemispheres.