Momentous events such as the sale of the family home, a young man coming clean with his family or the staging of a drag performance in a small town would seem like perfect ingredients for an intensely dramatic film full of conflict. But in his fourth feature “Czech Girl,” which premieres in the Crystal Globe competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, young Czech director Šimon Holý seems determined to lower the temperature as much as possible, crafting an enjoyable comedy-drama where there is never any doubt that everything will be okay in the end.

Despite the film’s festival profile, then, it is best approached not as an auteur offering, but as a mainstream commercial film aimed at local audiences, albeit with a slightly more daring theme than most titles of its type. But even from this particular perspective, Holý’s film remains an unconvincing work, too clumsy both formally and thematically to leave much of an impression.

Zdena (Pavla Tomicová) is a middle-aged woman who lives alone in a fairly large house in a Czech village and spends most of her time at the bedside of her sick mother in the hospital. In one of many small but annoying inconsistencies, the characters repeatedly refer to her isolation and reluctance to socialize since the death of her husband a few years ago, even though the film opens with Zdena at a dance and her subsequent attendance at a house party.

That feeling of wanting to make a movie is omnipresent, from the unflattering and garish TV-level costume design, to the inexplicable use of a wide-angle lens on several random occasions. However, it is more palpable at the level of the narrative itself. Possible sources of tension are introduced in such rigid and artificial ways, to present such obvious and valuable arguments, that the film at these moments comes to resemble an educational video.

Shortly after receiving an offer to sell her family home to a wealthy woman in the city, Zdena receives a rare, extended visit from her adult son, Lukáš (Jan Cina), who lives in France. One night, while watching TV together, she uses a homophobic slur, prompting Lukáš to come out as gay and tell her he works as a drag queen: a textbook example of a coming out story, complete with the mother’s tearful reaction, now in illustrated form.

However, when the two characters wake up the next day, they both immediately move on from the previous night’s painful argument. On the one hand, this kind of easy resolution seems like lazy writing. But there is also in “Czech Girl” a recurring suggestion that people are too nice and too reasonable for conflicts to really last. This naïve point of view could work well in a more finely crafted confection, where the clichés become part of the pleasure. “Czech Girl” sometimes promises precisely this kind of effortless pleasure, but it’s too uneven to make it work.

While it relies on established tropes for its story and characters, its flow is interrupted by inconsistencies and clumsy mistakes. One sequence in particular, in which Lukáš throws a tantrum because his mother is stuck in the past, comes out of nowhere, with the sole apparent purpose of injecting a very small dose of conflict, soon resolved, into a film that threatens to stagnate.

However, there is a bigger problem here. In its relentless positivism, “Czech Girl” could be seen as an attempt to normalize, through positive representations, lifestyles and sexualities that may seem abhorrent to older generations like Zdena’s. But there is a fine line between this worthwhile impulse and the simplistic idea that maternal love must always overcome deep-seated intolerance. The film draws much of its gentle humor from several moments in which Zdena works up the courage (!) to tell an acquaintance that her son has a boyfriend, but it’s reasonable to wonder what might happen if she meets someone who doesn’t react to a harmless little joke.

This awkwardness around homophobia is reflected in the film’s tonal indecisiveness. Since in “Czech Girl” it is Zdena’s cheerful character that covers every crack and resolves every conflict, Tomicová’s job is to make her optimism believable. The actor opts for an intensely expressive performance of wonder and maternal meekness, so polite that it pushes the film toward artifice. But Cina’s naturalistic turn as Lukáš, and the higher stakes for his character, ground the film in a semblance of reality. The friction between the two registers only produces a disconnected feeling of discomfort; perhaps a less serious and more eccentric approach could have achieved this uncomfortable combination.