In a small town in 19th-century France, a young man named Herve Joncour (Michael Pitt) quits the army to embark on an uncertain career as a silk trader. Japan is officially off-limits to foreigners, but it’s rumored to have the best silkworms. “And so,” he explains in voice-over, “I headed off to the end of the world.”

Herve traverses Europe, then endless miles of Russian steppe. Finally, guides lead him to the snow-blanketed mountain village where he will buy his silkworms. He has been made to wear a blindfold all the way up, and when the awestruck locals address him in a tongue he cannot understand, “Silk” leaves it un-subtitled. It really does feel like Herve Joncour has arrived at the end of the earth.

There he meets a silent, rosebud-lipped beauty (Sei Ashina) who serves him tea and then vanishes. Herve returns to France without learning her name. But neither he nor François Girard’s exquisitely atmospheric film (adapted by Mr. Girard and Michael Golding from the best-selling novella by Alessandro Baricco) takes leave of her; after departing from this remote corner of the pre-modern Orient, “Silk” continues to unfurl on a mist-shrouded higher plane. And by that I don’t mean that Japan Airlines commissioned it.

Actually, there are enough marketable Far East fantasies at work here — including no fewer than three steam bath scenes — to make you wonder. But “Silk” entrances because it’s so much more than it seems. Beneath the unabashedly old-fashioned story of forbidden love, Mr. Girard weaves a Buddhist-flavored lesson on the evasive nature of reality, with a final plot twist serving as the lovely last stitch.

Like most of the best love stories, it has more than two participants. The Japanese maiden is attached to the village’s headman (Koji Yakusho), and Herve cherishes Helene (Keira Knightley), his young wife in France. Herve’s relationship with both women is painfully incomplete: He and Helene can’t have a baby, while the satiny enigma he obsesses over in Japan, and crosses the world several more times to see, is constantly slipping in and out of his fingers.

It’s unfortunate that the humans don’t register as magnificently as everything else in the film. Technically, “Silk” is a work of the finest craftsmanship, from the graceful tableaux of cinematographer Alain Dostie to the impeccable set design of Francois Seguin, both of whom collaborated with Mr. Girard on his last film, “The Red Violin.” Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score adds even more pedigree.

The daisy-ish Ms. Knightley is outshone by all this, as is Mr. Pitt, an actor who does fine playing stoner-wastrels (including a Kurt Cobain doppelgänger in Gus Van Sant’s “Last Days”) but is less convincing as a Second-Empire French burgher. He has a moist, slow-witted quality that suggests the passionate shepherds of a former era — indeed, one pastoral scene early on finds his love (the European one) playfully balancing lilies on his eyelids.

But the fable works better with the merchant as Mr. Baricco wrote him: “One of those men who like to be observers at their own lives, any ambition to participate in them being considered inappropriate.” The novel’s Herve is blithe and withdrawn, but not moony. He doesn’t end up chasing a will-o’-the-wisp simply because he has a natural predilection for such things.

Mr. Baricco’s novel, first published in 1996, is a beguiling gem, a sort of postmodern bard’s tale, complete with refrains, that never rises above a murmur. Mr. Girard’s camera, appropriately, is a gentle one. The angles and swooping tracking shots of “The Red Violin” are absent here, and the camera often seems to move at the behest of a breeze. Mr. Girard also exchanges the book’s dry, andthat-was-that narrator for the more emotional voice of the torn silk trader. But he won’t envelop you in the rich folds of “Silk” nearly as much as the seductively told tale itself.