"In Bloom," on Two Young Girls Growing Up in Tbilisi Mariam Bokeria, left, and Lika Babluani in "In Bloom." Big World Pictures Eka and Natia , the 14-year-old best friends at the heart of "In Bloom," live in a place that seems to be crumbling at the edges. It's 1992, and their homeland, the former Soviet republic of Georgia, is at war. The fighting, in the northern Abkhazia region, is far from the capital, Tbilisi, where the girls live, but the conflict pops up frequently in the adult conversations, at least when the grown-ups are not screaming and cursing about other things. Natia's parents fight constantly, sometimes joined by her grandmother. If Eka's apartment is a bit quieter, that may be because her father is in prison. At school, the teacher browbeats and humiliates her students before losing control of the classroom. Out in the street, citizens lining up for bread shove and swear at one another. There was much discussion, in the early "90s, of the importance of civil society in post-Communist countries, but civility is precisely what is missing from the society depicted by Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross, who wrote and directed this astute, observant film. "In Bloom," Georgia's official entry in the best foreign language film Oscar sweepstakes, is one of a handful of recent movies about young women in modern patriarchal cultures. Like "Wadjda," "Fill the Void" and "Mother of George" (to name three striking examples), it matter-of-factly lays out the predicaments of its characters, balancing a strong, implicit feminist sensibility with a sympathetic sense of the power of tradition. The film's title refers both to Eka's awakening conscience and to the fact that Natia, who looks older and is more outgoing, has begun to attract male attention. Her flirtation with a young man named Lado at first seems like an innocent adolescent romance. But then, instead of flowers or candy, he gives her a pistol and a bullet, with the promise of more ammunition when he can get hold of it. The gun passes back and forth between Natia and Eka, generating a good deal of suspense and symbolizing the latent violence that hangs over every aspect of the friends" lives. But its specific purpose is to enable Natia to protect herself from being abducted and forced into marriage by another man. This practice, sometimes called bride kidnapping, is now illegal in Georgia, but it remains widespread in Central Asia, the Caucasus and other parts of the world. When it happens to Natia, Eka is horrified, but she seems to be alone in this reaction. Even Natia seems resigned to her new situation, and finds her husband's household a bit more peaceful than the home she left behind. "In Bloom," drawn in part from Ms. Ekvtimishvili's own memories, is tough and unsentimental, rather like Eka, and like some other films from countries once in the Soviet orbit. It was shot by the Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu with some of the same naturalistic clarity and subtle expressiveness that he brought to "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" and "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days." The two lead performances - Lika Babluani as Eka and Mariam Bokeria as Natia - are direct and unaffected, but also enigmatic in the way that nonprofessional screen acting can be in the hands of a sensitive director. The viewer has to guess at emotions that the characters themselves may not quite understand.