Zelary.

A torrid lovemaking scene opens this at once powerful and sensitive film from director Ondrej Trajan, set in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, 19431944. Zelary is a significant new contribution to the Eastern European war-film genre, and the war intrudes in several brutal ways, but its narrative heart is an unlikely love story. Eliska (Ana Geislerova) is a future doctor involved in the urban resistance; Joza (Gyorgy Cserhalmi) is a barely literate peasant from the Moravian mountain country. Physically, too, they differ. The vibrant young Eliska is pretty in a Julie Delpy sort of way--thin, with delicate features and red hair--while the older Joza is stolid and muscular, with the craggy face you would expect of a man of the mountains. A plot cuntrivance--the Gestapo is after Eliska-throws them together in a fictitious marriage to live in Joza's village, Zelary, in a beautiful valley, beautifully photographed by Asen Sopov. A series of short scenes structures the film as a kind of village epic--with many diverse, vivid characters and rich folkloric detail--unfolding with the changing seasons. The couple changes as well: in their chaste bedroom they become real husband and wife. Corny and you guessed it? Yes, but Zelary is handled throughout with such storytelling grace and understatement that what develops is entirely welcome and believable. (The film is based on a true story, as told in the autobiographical novella by Kvita Legatova.) Another kind of contrast: the carnality of the bedroom scene at the beginning of the film showing Eliska with her then lover and the tender, emotion-filled unions between Eliska and Joza--the latter are infinitely more erotic. The menace of war is never far away from village life. The SS makes its appearance, and there is a sequence with villagers taking refuge in a swamp reminiscent of a grim scene in Elem Klimov's terrifying war masterpiece, Come amt See. The real shocker here comes with the Red Army's appearance. A unit of Soviet soldiers fueled by drink, vengeance, and lust rampage Zelary even as they liberate it. Their loutish behavior inevitably affects the fate of Eliska and Joza. (Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, www.sonyclassics.com)