Description: A young widow, an aging widower-returnee, and a priest from a bankrupt parish are struggling to come to terms with the post-war environment, complete with its prejudices, illusions, and unpleasant mentality. What follows is a romantic comedy set in rough landscape, about a woman who falls in love with a local priest. He is not blind to her love, but is unable to choose between the church and her, until the circumstances force him to make his choice.
        Quirks of fate give shape to "What Is a Man Without a Mustache?" This pleasant if inconsequential romantic comedy from the Croatian director Hrvoje Hribar is distinguished by its good-natured sensibility and rowdy, slightly fabulous tone: a kind of Eastern European magic realism, without the magic.
        One gray afternoon, high up in a city construction project, a man without a mustache loses his balance and falls, with an audible splat, to his death. He is survived by his wife, the lovely, impetuous Tatjana (Zrinka Cvitesic), who, under the influence of idiosyncratic mourning, uses the settlement money from his death to purchase the rural hillside where he first wooed her.
        This otherwise unprepossessing mound of dirt turns to gold when Tatjana is bought out by the developers of a highway project, and she sets herself up in a little grocery business, tooting around town in a red convertible. For reasons explained largely by the dictates of generalized whimsy, Tatjana falls in love with Father Stipan (Leon Lucev), the local priest.
        Meanwhile, elsewhere in the village, the impressionable young Julija (Jelena Lopatic) is falling in love with Stanislav (Bojan Navojec), a goofy environmentalist who composes haiku about sausage, despite the objections of her father (Ivo Gregurevic).
        Various confrontations, complications and farcical rendezvous ensue, all of which come to a head with the arrival of Father Stipan's twin brother, an army officer played, in fake mustache, by Mr. Lucev.
        The Croatian context lends a certain novelty to these contrivances, and the pleasant pointless of it all is laced with a tantalizing tease of allegory suggested by the dialectical twins and the strain of mellow nationalism in the dialogue.