Tomislav, an idealistic young partisan war hero, becomes a leader in the emerging socialist society of a small Croatian village, and finds adjustment to the 'new Yugoslavia' extremely difficult. In the course of his duties he meets and falls in love with a middle-class ballerina, presumable sent to the country for 'cultura rehabilitation.' Becoming involved with her bourgeois family and caught within the contradictions of his society's shifting and evolving morality, he descends into disfavor with the authorities and is eventually imprisoned. In the end he finds a tragic end as he fails to reconcile divergent currents of personal and cultural reality.