Alexa Davalos

Alexa Davalos, ’Defiance’

THE French-born Alexa Davalos has all she needs to be a major movie star: serious talent, camera chemistry and a blue-eyed, dark-haired beauty with lush yet chiseled features that recall the young Elizabeth Taylor. Yet at 26, she has five years of television roles on her résumé and three less-than-indelible films. Edward Zwick’s “Defiance” (Dec. 31), a movie dominated by vivid male performances, may be the break she deserves.

“Defiance” is based on the true story of the Bielski brothers, played by Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell. After fleeing occupied Poland, they holed up in a forest in Belarus where they managed against horrific odds to create a coherent community, which continued to fight the Nazis and sustained itself with ingenuity. At war’s end 1,200 Jews, including some very young and some very old, emerged from the forest.

Co-starring as Lilka Ticktin, regarded as the most beautiful girl in the forest, Ms. Davalos makes her character much more than that. It’s true that her uncommon beauty is what catches the eye when she and her party first make their way into the settlement. But her intelligence, humor and subtle expressiveness hold our interest. The young, gentle-looking Lilka may be a stranger in a perilous new world, but Ms. Davalos conveys the inner will to gather her courage and find her place. In a scene right out of a folk tale, she’s on a winter food mission when she’s confronted by a thick-furred black German shepherd even hungrier than she is. All but dissolving in fear, she still dispatches him in a rewrite of “Little Red Riding Hood” that would make Angela Carter proud.

Eventually Lilka becomes the “forest wife” of Mr. Craig’s Tuvia, the settlement’s forceful, charismatic leader; the term implies a committed relationship in which the woman comes under the protection of the man. Mr. Craig, a powerhouse actor in a role like this, can smolder just about anyone right off the screen. But not Ms. Davalos, whose Lilka seems to bask in his radiant heat and shine it right back at him. He’s a commanding presence, but so, in her quieter way, is she. It’s that equation that makes their romance not just believable but also important.