The fashions and furnishings of Czechoslovakia in the 1980s (the height of the state’s racist program to repress the Roma population through forced sterilization) are painstakingly evoked in Slovak filmmaker Ivan Ostrochovský’s “Only Beautiful Things to Look At.” But the film’s attractive but strangely bloodless presentation gives the impression of a period drama set much further back, as if we were looking through the glass of a museum at the beautifully mounted arrowheads and artifacts of a long-vanished atrocity. In addition to the decision to centralize the perspective of a white female doctor, this old-school, soft-focus approach robs an undeniably well-intentioned film of a vital touch of urgency and discomfort, allowing viewers to relegate the cruelties it depicts to some imagined distant past, when in reality, the sterilization policy continued well into the 21st century in both the Czech and Slovak Republics.

The film begins with a montage of young Roma women, each filmed as if in a studio portrait, impassively absorbing a voiceover lecturing them about family planning. “Sterilization,” the voice falsely concludes, “allows Gypsy women to improve their family’s quality of life.” The intention behind the portrait is noble: to put a face to a crime that is most often recounted in impersonal statistics, when it is recognized. But although framed and lit with dignity by cinematographer Juraj Chlpík, none of these Romani women speak. The first words of argument or protest we hear are from Ingrid (Anna Geislerová), the film’s white protagonist, and she doesn’t talk about reproductive rights at all. Instead, she faces an all-male panel while interviewing for the position of chief physician at the hospital where she works. Ingrid knows that the position will probably go to one of her male colleagues, but that doesn’t stop her from being angry and disappointed when it actually happens.

Outside of her work at the hospital, which largely consists of assessing and performing sterilizations in a procedure that leaves patients with a small scar below the navel nicknamed “the bow,” Ingrid has what can only be described as a beautiful life. With her husband, music teacher Maros (Vlad Ivanov), she lives in a beautiful house in the countryside, where her bedroom, with glass panels on both sides and views of a lush forest, almost seems like the lair of a fairy-tale princess. On warm nights, she and Maros read, drink wine, and listen to classical music; On his days off he goes for a walk in the forest or, when it’s hot, he visits the nearby river and looks benevolently at the Roma children swinging playfully on tire tubes.

It is only through her blossoming friendship with Agata (a radiant Simona Boledovičová), a kindly orderly who is reticent about her Romani identity, that Ingrid eventually begins to feel uncomfortable with the work she does to help the hospital meet government-recommended sterilization quotas. Ostrochovský’s film, co-written with Marek Leščák, is not as stark as a white savior narrative, but it certainly assumes that the best conduit for a wide audience to understand the cruelty endured by Czechoslovak Roma families is the moral awakening of a white woman.

This flawed approach is particularly frustrating because Agata’s own story and the way she comes to reconcile with her Romani background is by far the most intriguing narrative thread. When she was orphaned, Ágata was separated from her sister Jula (an excellent Eva Mores), and each of them went on to lead very different lives. Jula married into the gypsy community, has had two children and is pregnant with an unwanted third. Agata, who barely recognizes their connection at first, has been more independent, living with a roommate and working at the hospital, and is recently getting serious with a boyfriend. “Is it white?” -Jula asks, surprised when she hears that he is a soldier. “Good for you.”

The tides of unspoken resentment and disapproval that flow between the sisters are fascinating, with Agata able to move between Jula’s world, in a cramped apartment in a dilapidated building where children play on dirty stairs, and Ingrid’s enviably refined domestic environment. In the end, like Chlpík’s limpid camera, Agata comes to see the beauty in both, when in the film’s most moving moment, the sisters are tacitly reconciled while Jula’s children splash in the bathtub at bath time. Here there would have been an opportunity to investigate the long-term consequences for Romani women who carried “the bow”, many of whom had been misled in a procedure that was misrepresented to them, in a language they did not speak or in documentation they could not read.

Instead, the film insistently returns us to Ingrid. While the first stirrings of her consciousness keep her awake, while she rests between crumpled white sheets watching a beetle rolling on her pillow, while she is depicted in macro close-ups that emphasize the blondeness of her hair, the clarity of her skin, the blue of her eyes. Indeed, until a finale that resolves the remaining conflict with a rather simplistic miracle, the film’s beauty practically becomes a liability, placing the true plight of the Roma at various distances of perspective and aesthetic manipulation, until one begins to wonder why we are only given beautiful things to look at, when there are so many ugly things that deserve more attention.