The Czech filmmaking team of director Jan Sverák and screenwriter Zdenek Sverák -- who collaborated on Kolya, 1996's Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film -- draw on their nation's sad history for their background here. After the Communists seized control of Czechoslovakia after World War II, they imprisoned Czech pilots who had flown with the RAF during the war, afraid these men would take up the fight for freedom once again. It's in 1950, one of these work camps -- from which the inmates are assured there is no parole -- that we meet Franta Sláma (Ondrej Vetchy), ironically incarcerated alongside former SS officers. As a lieutenant in the Czech air force, he had been forced, in 1939, to step aside for the snide, smugly superior Nazis who took over his airbase when the Germans occupied his country.

In the wartime flashback that consumes most the film, Franta and his young protege, Karel Vojtisek (Krystof Hádek), flee to England to fly and fight alongside the British, along with other of their fellow Czech pilots. The culture clash they encounter in England and the initial reluctance of the Brits to put their guests right out in glory's path make for some crusty humor and some startling imagery -- the Czech pilots practice their formations on bicycle fitted out with wings -- that prompts both incredulous laughter and tears of frustration on behalf of the Czech boys, who just want to get in the air and kill some Germans. But always, there's an air of heartache hanging over Franta, from the moment he says good-bye to his sweetheart in Czechoslovakia, leaving her under the watchful eye of a jealous would-be suitor. And when he finds himself unexpectedly falling for an English lass, Susan (Tara Fitzgerald), with whom the naive and romantic Karel has convinced himself he is in love, we know that no happy ending can be in the offing.

The Sveráks -- director Jan is writer Zdenek's son -- have no need to harp on sentiment: All we need to know, all the emotion we need to feel, is on the sad, hard faces of Vetchy, with the determined face of a younger DeNiro, and Fitzgerald, a tough- as- nails practicality beneath her prettiness. The restraint on the part of the filmmakers isn't limited to the emotional, either: Plane crashes, dogfights, explosions... all are staged with an astonishing lack of artifice, a lack of glorification, a lack of the blow- 'em- up glee that characterizes Hollywood film -- and Pearl Harbor especially -- as if stuff blowing up were the story, and not how the people around the stuff blowing up deal with it.

But it's attitude that distinguishes Dark Blue World and makes it so worthwhile. The Sveráks have made a glorious, tremendously knowing film that recognizes that grownups don't stamp their feet and rage at the world for failing to provide an appropriate environment in which our own personal dreams can take flight; grownups, like Franta and Susan and, finally, Karel, realize that sometimes, what's important is larger than ourselves, that grownups give up their own personal desires to a larger cause, to the dreams of the entire world.