When I first heard about the new Milos Forman film, Goya's Ghosts, the only Jewish angle I was expecting was the star turn by Natalie Portman — everybody's favorite Israeli-born actress. Portman was chosen by Forman largely because he noticed her close facial resemblance to the subject of an actual Francisco Goya painting, Milkmaid of Bordeaux. Surely the fact that she has won remarkable acclaim in a prolific body of work for one so young (26) also figured in Forman's casting decision.

I learned that what is in fact Jewish in the film is its central, tragic plot line: the arrest, torture, and imprisonment of the main character, Ines (Portman), by the Spanish Inquisition in 1792 — before Napoleon abolished the nefarious institution (also shown in the film) 15 years later. In a less consequential role, Portman portrays Ines' teenage daughter at that later time.

Ines' crime? She is accused of being a Judaizer — one who secretly maintains Jewish practices or beliefs — when Inquisition spies witness one of the sure signs of hidden adherence to the despised faith. They see her in a tavern recoiling from an offering of pork that has been served to her rowdy table in an unappetizing way — grilled whole and hacked open but with the head still attached.

Beforehand, the spies are lectured by Brother Lorenzo (Spaniard Javier Bardem, who acquits himself with icy effectiveness in this complex role), charging them to search for Judaizers and Protestants. A test for the former among males is a circumcised penis. (Where have we heard that before?) This fictional tale reminds us that this sort of paranoid scrutiny was commonplace in the church-dominated police state that Spain was in the 18th century.

Yet Ines is not, as accused, a secret practitioner of Jewish rites. She is unaware that her father (a wealthy merchant who is generous in his contributions to the church) had a Jewish ancestor nearly 200 years before, a Catholic convert who had immigrated from the Netherlands. Ines responds earnestly but quizzically to her Inquisitor that she simply doesn't like the taste of pork. What follows is a shockingly abrupt transition into the peculiar brutality and demented thinking that characterized the so-called Holy Office.

Brother Lorenzo is seen early on as both a politically astute sophisticate and a career-driven fanatic. He explains to his brother Inquisitors why the same Francisco Goya who paints scenes of poverty and unflattering caricatures of church authorities — which make him suspect in their eyes — is also painting his own portrait: Goya is regarded as Spain's greatest living artist and as such paints even for the royal family.

Prior to her arrest, Ines sits as a studio model for Goya; the relationship she and Brother Lorenzo share with the artist serves to bind their fates. This bond also occasions a life-altering lesson for Lorenzo; as a dinner guest of Ines' father and in the company of Goya, the Inquisitor is forced to confront the realization that torturing the accused — putting them to "the question" as the euphemism goes — is utterly useless when the quest is for truth. (If so inclined, one can certainly read into the plot messages about the controversy in American society on the use of torture against terror suspects.)

The absurdities, bestial cruelties, and injustices perpetrated by the Inquisition are matched — even exceeded in the volume of bloodshed — by the butchery and zealotry of the French and their Spanish collaborators in overthrowing the Old Regime. Although liberated theoretically in the name of the noble ideal of human rights proclaimed by the French Revolution, the Spanish people rise up and defeat the foreign invader to restore a vestige of the Old Order, with the decisive assistance of Wellington's British army. (In this, there is also some resonance with what is happening in Iraq, although the U.S. is more the stumbler and bumbler in the name of freedom and democracy there than the harsh occupiers that the French were in Spain.)

Goya's art lends a sensual lushness to the film. The artist is played (by Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard) as a decent but surprisingly bland observer. His works graphically depict the injustice and grinding poverty of the Old Regime; his paintings and etchings even more famously illustrate the barbarities of war.

Goya's Ghosts opens across the country on Aug. 3.