Directed by Jan Sverák, whose sentimental Kolya won a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1996, Dark Blue World is a Czech version of Pearl Harbor that starts out with a perfidious Axis victory — the 1938 Nazi takeover of the country after the notorious Munich appeasement treaty. Then, in typical Eastern European fashion, things get really bad. After losing his country, his girlfriend, and his dog, Czech airman Frantisek Sláma (Ondrej Vetchy) flees with his squadron to England and joins the RAF — where, in short order, he loses several Spitfires, a number of comrades (do these guys ever shoot down an enemy plane?), and eventually his freedom as he ends up in the Stalinist gulag from which he narrates the tale. And I thought we won that war. Balancing the pessimism is a bawdy humor and bathos and a central love triangle involving Frantisek, his callow but cute best friend Karel Vojtísek (Krystof Hádek) and Susan (Tara Fitzgerald), a fetching Englishwoman whose husband has been lost at sea and who can’t decide between innocence (Karel) and experience (Frantisek). Neither can the movie, really, so it settles instead for cynicism leavened with treacle, a refreshing change perhaps from unreflected jingoism, but equally unenlightening.