Love blooms in an Israeli bunker for "Yossi and Jagger," in a brief, moving film that dares to show two men in love and war. They navigate between their military duty and secret affection amidst a ragtag bunker of starry-eyed young recruits stuck at the frontlines of a battlefield, each preoccupied with dreams, torn between patriotism and personal desires.

Yossi (Ohad Knoller) and Jagger (Yehuda Levi) are Israeli soldiers somewhere on the Lebanese border, and as the film opens they’re digging a hole while pulling rank and alpha male swagger with the other soldiers. We’re sure we are in for some examination of Middle East conflict through the close-up lens of a small group of recruits.

But a few short minutes later, they sneak off together and frolic in the snow, kissing, dancing, making love and revealing a secret romance we didn’t see coming beneath their macho veneers. Yossi is the pragmatic and focused superior officer, and Jagger is his soldier subordinate, a younger, wilder and handsomely flamboyant idealist who imagines an exotic romantic future they might share.

Back at the bunker, soldiers are crowded into a small place and sexual tension is everywhere, compounded by the arrival of two beautiful young female recruits who are feminine, sensual and available. And the sexual politics spread out from there, involving trysts with superior officers, secret crushes and clandestine encounters.

There’s an interesting camaraderie in the troops that has everything to do with youth and little to do with military service, which to everyone seems an inconvenient necessity. "Yossi and Jagger" succeeds as an effective portrait of young people reluctantly called to a war, crammed in close quarters and preoccupied by love, music, social interaction, and the future. War is, to them, a necessary detour, a mandatory stay enroute to the rest of their lives.

"Yossi and Jagger," though it has a gay love affair at its core, is a film about innocence and idealism stamped out by the senselessness of war. This is not a gay film, per se, rather a film with a gay relationship intertwined with the rest of daily life. Wisely, director Eytan Fox offers their relationship as one part of a slight but engrossing series of maneuvers—personal and military—that take place over a short period inside the military stronghold.

Young Israeli actor Yehuda Levi, with the charisma and sexiness of a true movie star, plays Jagger. It’s easy to see why at home Levi is referred to as Israel’s answer to Tom Cruise, since he dominates the film even when he’s not onscreen, boyishly handsome and dreamily optimistic in a near hopeless place.

"Yossi and Jagger" is a model of economy and storytelling, creating two memorable characters we wish we’d spent more time with. It’s formidable that director Fox packs a wallop in the film’s last scene, which simply involves a meeting of sorts, a too-late introduction where one critical line of dialogue speaks implicit volumes.

It’s a small film with a poignancy that sneaks up on you.