Those who are as old as I am may remember being young in 1967 when Bo Widerberg’s “Elvira Madigan” made such an impression on us impressionable youths. Even today you can hardly buy a recording of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21, K. 467, without seeing images from this tragic love story and reading the notice that the piece’s now-familiar slow movement makes it the “Elvira Madigan” concerto.

Terrence Malick was 24 in 1967, and the movie must have made a big impression on him as well, for in his 60s he has brought out a new movie, “The New World,” in which he portrays the first arrival of the English in America through Widerberg’s lens and Mozart’s music.

To be sure, Mr. Malick has made a few changes. He’s jumped 21 Kochel numbers to No.488 and the slow movement of the 23rd Piano Concerto as the accompaniment to his lovers’ dalliance in the forest. And he alternates it with a passage, almost as often repeated, from the Prelude to “Das Rheingold” by Richard Wagner that is meant to suggest momentous discovery.

Oh, and instead of making the lovers choose, tragically, to stay together, he makes them choose, tragically, to split up.

But the message is essentially the same as Widerberg’s. As Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) says in one of his endless interior monologues, rendered in voiceover, “There is only this”- meaning idyllic sex with Pocahontas (Q’Orianka Kilcher) – “all else is unreal.”

Well, not as such. Once back among the English, he changes his mind. “It was a dream,” yet another voiceover monologue says. “Now I am awake.” Later, he comes to regret this flip-flop, and when he meets Pocahontas again in England, long after they have split up and she has married John Rolfe (Christian Bale), he tells her: “I thought it was a dream, what we knew in the forest, but it’s the only truth.”

Even “Elvira Madigan” knew better than to suppose that making love in the forest was the only truth. There was also that other truth – of work and family and responsibility – on which the two lovers deliberately turned their backs. They knew they were opting for unreality, in other words, where Captain Smith, like Mr. Malick, seems confused about which is which.

All they know is what they want to believe. And this also comes across in what turns out to be little more than the incidental “encounter” of Old and New Worlds.

You’d think this was an important enough historical event for the film to be about it, as the title suggests. But it’s not. Instead, “the New World” turns out to lie within us – now there’s a new idea – and what is arguably the most momentous discovery of the last thousand years is turned into the backdrop for a love story.

Perhaps because it is only a backdrop, and because the reality he is focused on is an interior one of thoughts and feelings, Mr. Malick thinks that he has no obligation to historical reality. At any rate, insofar as there is any of the historical New World in this movie, it is a hippie fantasy rather than the real thing.

The Indians, so far as we see them, never work. They take their ease and play all day, apparently, while living in peace, harmony, and plenty. Meanwhile, the settlers work and slave constantly and yet are reduced to eating shoe leather – and each other.

The latter seem to have no idea of hunting, fishing, or agriculture and to be utterly dependent on getting game and corn from the Indians or supplies from England. They are only interested in searching for gold, even if they starve in the attempt, and in fighting each other.

Similarly, the Indians are all attractive, graceful, well-proportioned, and handsomely decorated with tattoos, like Allen Iverson. The English are all dirty, ugly, toothless, and bedraggled, or all of them except the obviously Irish Captain Smith, and their gold-lust – or is it God-lust? – makes them hate-filled, vicious, and constantly at one another’s throats.

When Smith is saved from death by Pocahontas – who, by the way, is never named in the film until she is renamed Rebecca – he is presented with a stark choice: Live the hippie life in peace, plenty, and sexual freedom among the Indians, or go back to the English settlers and return to a life of nothing but hardship, treachery, bitterness, and celibacy.

Which would you choose?

Why Captain Smith goes back remains a mystery, as is his subsequent jilting of Pocahontas when it looks as if he could have her without going native. But Mr. Malick has little time for linear narrative and questions of motivation and plausibility. His film is organized as a series of tableaux vivants to which we must supply our own context. Even the rescue of Captain Smith by Pocahontas’s throwing herself upon his body is not portrayed except in its aftermath. Mr. Malick seems to have a positive distaste for action.

In the battles between the English and the Indians, the latter always appear to be getting the better of the former, but all is chaotic and aimless and impossible to make any sense of militarily. There is just a series of pictures. Watching them, you feel as if you are trying to make sense of a book in a language you don’t understand from looking at the illustrations.

Not that the illustrations themselves can be faulted. This is a film, like “Elvira Madigan,” with lots of pretty pictures and lots of pretty music, but the world it portrays is new only in the sense that it is Mr. Malick’s own.

jbowman@nysun.com