Nicolas Cage and Penélope Cruz star in this romantic drama based on the novel by Louis de Bernières. In 1941, Italian officer Captain Antonio Corelli (Cage), an opera-loving mandolin player, finds the population resentful when he first arrives on the Italian-occupied Greek island of Cephalonia. But soon his involvement with local beauty Pelagia (Cruz) helps him form a bond with the local community and he starts to question his own involvement in the war. The tentative love affair between Corelli and Pelagia is then tested by the brutal arrival of the Germans in 1943.