The last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire are the setting of “The Chambermaid,” a same sex/class-crossing romance that blossoms in World War I era Prague.

This sumptuous Czech/Slovak co-production, performed in Czech, Slovakian, Hungarian and German, is “Downton Abbey” with more explicit sex, nudity and unfiltered glimpses at all the messy bodily functions servants clean up to keep the posh — Germans in this case — in the comfort to which they figure they’re entitled.

Anka (Dana Droppová) is a blonde teen in the provinces, the “bastard” child of a mother who has just remarried. Her gruff stepdad reads an ad in a paper seeking a chambermaid in the city, and next thing Anka knows, that’s her fate — a long coach ride into Prague where she’ll join the staff of the home of the German aristocrats whom she’s always to address as “Milady” (Zuzana Mauréry) and “Milord” (Karel Dobrý).

All-knowing senior housekeeper Liza (Vica Kerekes) is her guide into this world, where the male servants relish their piggish power over the women just as Milord dallies, at his convenience, with Liza.

Kristina the cook (Anna Geislerová) is from the same village as Anka, so there’s no escaping that “bastard” label here. Not that the rich family of nags and slappers that they work for care.

Oldest daughter Resi (Radka Caldová) has picked up on her parents’ cruelty Bullied herself by a mother determined to not be “stuck” with her, with Anka forced to “get the books” for Resi at dinner so that she can eat with one under each armpit to keep her elbows nobly at her side, Resi pushes around Anka because she can.

And then she rethinks her as a co-conspirator. Anka is the one she confides in about the young man (Cyril Dobrý) her parents have decided is a suitable mate. But what can she expect on her wedding night? Her mother’s explained the facts of married life under a repressive patriarchy.

“You’ll understand after your first beating.”

But “What is Gustav going to do with me?” is a question Anka can only answer cryptically. “What all men do.” Her orders are to “find out” and report back to her mistress. Anka promptly submits to an over-attentive manservant (Lukas Pelc) and relates what she’s learned.

“It’s endurable.”

Demonstrating the delicate points of love-making bonds the two girls. And no Gustav brutality or sudden war can break that.

Director and co-writer Mariana Cengel-Solcanská — she made “Scumbag” with Droppová and Pelc — keeps the focus on the two women in a romance of exacting attention to period detail. This is the world of she-who-scrubs-the -bloody-sheets and she-who-must-empty-chamber-pots-into-the-city-sewers.

Rural folkways and superstition are called on before any doctor is summoned over a pregnancy — wanted or unwanted.

Droppová manages the open-faced innocence we’re expected to buy into in Anka, a child who resolves to grow up — fast — when she falls for a young woman just as trapped as she is, only in luxury and an unpleasant if not downright abusive marriage.

The women are stoic, shrinking from conflict and all-but-resigned to their fates, and the men prone to ruling this house with varying degrees of power over them. Caldová plays the subtlest story arc even as her character is making what seems like the shortest journey. Kerekes lets us see the “dreamer” in the delusional Liza, and Geislerová is flinty and no-nonsense in the flesh as Kristina, who won’t “curse” a hated husband headed into battle but who will tell you what she won’t do, step by step.

The plot of this “true story” is as melodramatic as any “Upstairs/Downton” soap opera, with just a light sprinkling of the ethnic resentments of an ungainly, teetering, multi-cultural empire that’s backed itself into an imperialist conflagration that will shatter empires, norms, borders and class distinctions.

The love affair will be tested. The consequences of a world war will be brought home as surely as the consequences of love affairs and politics rest uneasily under this belle epoque mid-city garden home’s roof.

But it all gloriously glides by, an upended city world of dinner parties and Strauss waltzes at the piano, a too-trusting aristocrat who leaves it to servants to “burn this” or that possible “state secret,” and a way of life in the provinces barely impacted by the ever-shifting borders and the end of travel by stagecoach.

Rating: unrated, nudity, sex, some violence

Cast: Dana Droppová, Radka Caldová, Vica Kerekes, Lukas Pelc,
Zuzana Mauréry, Anna Geislerová, Cyril Dobrý and Karel Dobrý

Credits:Directed by Mariana Cengel-Solcanská, scripted by Mariana Cengel-Solcanská and Hana Lasicová . An Omnibus Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:54