Starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard. Rated 14A

There’s a beautiful golden-age feel to Allied, that having everything to do with the way director Robert Zemeckis faithfully and fetishistically captures a long-gone era.

Right from the moment Brad Pitt’s Max Vatan parachutes into World War II Morocco, we’re immersed in a time when art-deco bars populate every corner in Casablanca. Later, Artie Shaw’s “Concerto for Clarinet” rages on the gramophone at booze-soaked London house parties.

Cigarettes are consumed at a rate that would impress Humphrey Bogart, and picnic baskets are an essential part of lazy Sunday afternoons. You can’t swing a pint glass in a pub without hitting someone in uniform, and being a spy is the most exotic job in a world at war with Nazi Germany.

What might be most admirable about Allied is its audacity. The lovers-in-a-dangerous-time thriller wants nothing less than to be a modern-day Casablanca, and it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t succeed.

Things start out on the exotic, palm-lined streets of Morocco’s most exotic city, with Pitt’s Vatan arriving in town to meet up with French Resistance fighter Marianne Beauséjour (Marion Cotillard). Pitt’s emotionally guarded Canadian intelligence officer is working out of London, while Marianne is a spy on a mission from Paris, with both charmingly able to switch between English and French.

Initially, the two don’t know each other any better than Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but they make an immediate connection. It doesn’t hurt that both are screamingly attractive, whether dressed up and out on the town for cocktails or sharing breakfast at their modest flat. Pitt has always cleaned up well, and he certainly does here; Cotillard looks beamed in straight from Hollywood’s most fabled of ages.

Smartly, it takes a while for the two to act on the fact that—against their better judgment—they’re falling in love. Allied’s greatest scenes are its early ones, with the couple slowly connecting while sharing cigarettes at night on the rooftop of their apartment, the call to prayer far off in the distance, the sky above a carpet of shimmering diamonds.

There’s a breathless danger and smouldering sexual tension as they plot to take out a Nazi ambassador, and that nicely sets up the back half of Allied. Our spies later end up in London, married with a kid and adjusting to a life where—apart from nightly German bombings of the city—the biggest stress is planning roaring house parties.

But then British intel suggests someone might not be who she’s been pretending to be. Enough red herrings are dropped early on to keep us guessing.

From that point, Allied becomes a study in mistrust, as we watch two people locked in a relationship where trust has suddenly become an issue. And it’s devastating, mostly because the two actually do seem to care for each other—a testament to the old-school chemistry of Pitt and Cotillard.

Allied’s ultimate triumph? That would be making us long for that long-gone time captured in the film. War might be hell, but that only seems to make everyone caught up in it determined to live life to the fullest, making something normally insignificant like a Sunday picnic—a downed German bomber still smoking in the background—seem fantastically poignant. Love seemed to have meaning, if only because it provided something to hold on to in a world gone hopelessly mad.

Maybe everything, booze and chain-smoked cigarettes excepted, really was better way back when.