Starring Maggie Smith and Judi Dench. Rating unavailable. Opens Friday, May 27, at the Park

Ladies in Lavender is a delicate, thoughtful gem of a movie and deserves a wider audience than the Masterpiece Theatre crowd it's going to get. This is not to say that there's a lot of substance to the tale of two spinsters having a flutter on the eve of the Second World War, but the careful, lyrical treatment, from actor-turned-director Charles Dance (working from an ancient short story by William J. Locke), is so perfectly scaled to its basic intentions that the film is remarkable in its own quiet way.

The "ladies" are two retired country types, albeit the sort who didn't do a lot of labour in their prime, and it's hard to discern here the effort on the parts of Judi Dench and Maggie Smith-playing sensitive Ursula and her more dominant sister, Janet, respectively-they make it look so easy. But the Dames don't grab the opportunity to do any grandstanding; they melt into the Cornish seaside town where they are both a cut above and part of the fishing folk around them.

Life continues eventlessly for the aging graces (only one has been married, before the Great War widowed her, and little is said of that) until they spot what looks like a corpse washed up in the cove below their rustic cliff house. The body is alive, however, and it turns out to belong to a young Polish shipwreck survivor called Andrea. He's played by Good Bye, Lenin's appealing Daniel Brí¼hl, who suggests a more continental Davy Jones, if the lead Monkee had ever grown up.

They carry him and put him in a nice feather bed, where Andrea heals, very slowly and quite comfortably. Soon, they determine that he's not a German spy and, in fact, is a budding concert violinist. Once he manages to borrow a fiddle from a gormless workman, it becomes hard to hide his talent-a matter of some concern to the sisters, and particularly for Ursula, who develops a late-in-life schoolgirl crush on the lad.

As he ventures forth among suspicious locals, there's additional trouble in the form of a mysterious Russian visitor, played by the cast's only weak link, Natascha McElhone. Her alternately smug and tentative qualities (especially in the accent department) undercut her part of the story, which finds Andrea faced with opportunities of career and, dare we say it, love.

Lavender's denouement recalls old-fashioned entertainments in the Humoresque vein. (Some of the director's slo-mo effects are too mawkish, in fact.) But the film is elevated not just by the lead performances-which include Miriam Margolyes as the rotund housekeeper who is slowly won over by the young man's charm-but by Dance's obvious affection for the Cornish people in the background. The faces captured (by The Truman Show's Peter Biziou) when everyone gathers to listen to a climactic radio broadcast are as rugged and resilient as the coastline that gives them life.