The problem with living in a totalitarian regime is that you can’t be an idiot. Not that Perla (Rebeka Polokova), the artist and protagonist of Alexandra Makarova’s sophomore film, is an idiot. She’s a free-willed young woman: seductive and tenacious, and expressing her wildness even as she looks after her piano prodigy daughter Julia (Carmen Diego) and engages in a deepening and loving relationship with Josef (Simon Schwarz), who brings her some much needed ballast. The year is 1981 and she is living in Vienna as an exile from Czechoslovakia. She has secrets, possibly traumas, but it hasn’t inhibited her in her new life. There’s a freedom which she expresses also in her art, though there are shadows that lurk there too. Her career looks set to take off, with an invitation to exhibit in New York.

So all is hunky-dory until the upward trajectory is broken by a series of unwelcome phone calls from the old country and old wounds are reopened. Perla’s former partner and Julia’s father Andrej (Noel Czuczor) has been released from prison and wants to see the daughter he has never met. Will Perla risk going back under an assumed identity to the country she fled? What emotional ties still bind her to her old home?

Makarova’s film, shot by Georg Weiss, is framed in an academy ratio, or as near as damn it, and has an artist’s care in composition. Nary a frame goes amiss in both telling the story and being in itself a thing of stark beauty. Whether it’s a devastating hotel breakfast scene in the midst of balloons left over from last night’s party, or a misty bus ride into the countryside; Makarova puts her characters in settings which always seem to work against the straightforward needs of drama. A light in a corridor keeps switching off while emotionally fraught goodbyes are made. On one level it’s just an annoying timer, but on another it expresses the way something will interrupt life, repeatedly and unnecessarily.

The world will not let you be at even the most banal level. And this is exaggerated even further when it comes to the aforementioned oppressive society. So let’s get back to being an idiot in a totalitarian regime. In Czechoslovakia, Perla and her family find queues, rationing and surveillance that could be the secret police or simply a nosy old man offended at how much food they’re ordering. At any point, things can go wrong and here Perla’s freedom begins to feel reckless and Polokova is superb in leading us along with her questionable decisions. We might want to shake her, but we always understand her. You can’t help see a normal expression of freedom as stupidity: a normal urge to do what you want to do – collect your parents’ remains for instance, or eat your fill of a long missed meal – as some excessive indulgence. And it is this distortion that the film captures perfectly. You’re shouting at the screen for Perla to anticipate the authorities, to acquiesce, to basically obey in repressing herself for the sake of her own safety and that of her family.

Also, rendered with care and skill is the period detail, by production designer Klaudia Kiczak and art directors Brigita Teplanova and Dorotea Volfova, down to the font and design of the titles. Overall, the film has the look and feel of Pawel Pawilkowski’s films Ida and Cold War might have looked like if they’d been shot in colour. There’s a risk that such careful work could dip into kitsch but in a sense that also follows Perla’s own dubious nostalgia for the bad country; she is being drawn back there with a fatal magnetic longing.

Perla premiered in the 54th International Film Festival Rotterdam, when this piece was originally written. Also showing at the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival.