While escaping war-torn China, a group of Europeans crash in the Himalayas, where they are rescued and taken to the mysterious Valley of the Blue Moon, Shangri-La.
While the grad student played by Harper pursues his thesis, Christian decides he, too, wants to write about the strange customs particular to the village of their mutual friend Pelle, which is more like a commune, or the Nordic offspring of the mountainfolk in the 1973 musical version of “Lost Horizon.”