The city of Maribor before the Second World War, and Maribor after its liberation mark the period in which the film Cafe Astoria is set. The story relates with a gentle melancholy and a slight irony the lives of a middle-class family: the cafe owner, his wife and their son. Through their individual destinies we become acquainted with the social and historical background of a by-gone era; the social and national differences of pre-war Maribor, divisions among the wealthy and poor, and nationally minded Slovenes and fanatic Germanophils. The first year after the war introduced the absurd characteristic cruel measures of the so-called revolutionary social transformations in which calamity and coincidence intervene, resulting in events of comic nature, of course, as seen from a safe distance of fifty years.
Carmen, a free-spirited young woman who sometimes earns money as a prostitute, lives a bohemian existence in a small town where most of the locals allow her to do as she pleases. Jose, a naive young man who has just been hired as the town's new police officer, arrests her. However, Jose is soon drawn into Carmen's sensual spell, and he is compelled to do her bidding as she slowly brings him to his doom.
