Hinging, as it does, on a woman’s decision either to move to an Italian villa with a gentle older man or remain married to a petty crook whose controlling, abusive ways quicken her heartbeat, “Beauty in Trouble,” a new film from the Czech Republic, could have been made in Hollywood in the 1950s or France in the ’30s — at least on a superficial plot level. Nevertheless (and in spite of being inspired by the English poet Robert Graves’s verse of the same name), director Jan Hrebejk and co-writer Petr Jarchovsky combine to fashion a distinctively disillusioned Eastern European tone.

Fate has indeed blessed Marcela (Ana Geislerova) with beauty. It has also bestowed upon her Jarda (Roman Luknar), a husband whose domineering ways receive a relatively healthy and noisy airing out in the couple’s boudoir. It’s so noisy, in fact, that their young daughter and son (Michaela Mrvikova and Adam Misik, respectively) are accustomed to expressionlessly clamping their hands over their ears while Mom and Dad strain the marital bed. The family’s precarious financial state (the film is set in Prague in the aftermath of the devastating 2002 floods there) and Jarda’s on-site car-theft and chop-shop business have hung an irreparable burden on their household. After an especially bitter exchange with her husband (followed by passionate sex), Marcela packs up her things and takes the children to live in her mother’s tiny apartment.

Her mother (Jana Brejchová) welcomes her daughter home with open arms, cupboard, and cot, but Marcela’s stepfather, Uncle Richie (Jiri Schmitzer), is another story. A creature of remarkably assured unction and resourceful ill will, Uncle Richie conducts a relentless psychological war with his stepdaughter and her children. When not being quizzed by the kids, scolded by Uncle Richie, or second-guessed by her mother, Marcela has to weather repeated ambushes and entreaties from her religiously obsessed mother-in-law to return to Jarda. But when his arrest and conviction for stealing a car temporarily eliminate that option, it brings Marcela together with the car’s owner, Evzen (Josef Abrham), a rich Czech expatriate temporarily returned home from Tuscany.

“You’ve got two kids and a husband in jail,” Uncle Richie reminds Marcela when she returns home, drunk on wine and apparent security after an evening out on Evzen’s dime. Though age and the pernicious voodoo of personal chemistry leave Marcela and Evzen’s physical relationship relatively free of sparks (the children have no trouble sleeping soundly through Mom and her new boyfriend’s lovemaking), the wealth and attentiveness that Evzen shares so willingly have an allure all their own.

The realistic and gently unsentimental pitch of “Beauty in Trouble,” which opens Friday at the Angelika Film Center, makes the film’s outcome a no-brainer. But in spite of an episodic, coincidence-driven narrative, the journey to Marcela’s decision is an emotionally honest one that showcases pleasantly rich explorations of a half-dozen or so key characters and the bonds that connect them. Mr. Hrebejk is clearly a director who values his cast’s contributions, and the acting on display in “Beauty in Trouble” is uniformly excellent. Ms. Geislerova graces Marcela with the elastic, pragmatic focus of a professional survivor, as well as a slyly malleable sensuality that propels her through life only slightly less than her instinct for self-preservation does. Mr. Schmitzer lends Uncle Richie an infectiously casual, cadaverous, impishly predatory malevolence that is a perverse pleasure to watch.

A film of disarming, down-market whimsy and a beguiling egalitarian curiosity about its own story world, “Beauty in Trouble” is a charming slice-of-life stroll to a destination that, though unsurprising, lies at the end of an authentically rough trail of compromise.