Zelary
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DVD Cover Information Actor: Anna Geislerová, György Cserhalmi, Ivan Trojan, Jaroslava Adamová, Miroslav Donutil Director: Ondrej Trojan Brand: Sony Producer: Danny Krausz Producer: Helena Uldrichová Producer: Jaroslav Kucera Producer: Kurt Stocker Producer: Manfred Fritsch Writer: Kveta Legátová Writer: Petr Jarchovský DVD: Region Code 99 Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Czech (Original Language) Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 1.78:1 Running Time: 150 minutes DVD Release Date: 2005-02-08 Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment |
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Movie Reviews of Zelary
Movie Review: Ultimately irritating and unsatisfying
Summary: 3 Stars
Zelary was on many reviewers' Best of 2005 lists, but what these people saw, I guess I'm missing. It is beautifully filmed, and the story maintains a certain tension throughout as you wait to see whether Eliska/Hana will be found by the Nazis, but it fails on at least on major level and ends on a note of pointless bloodshed and tragedy.
The first clue that this might not be for me was right in the opening scene: Eliska comes home with her doctor boyfriend and the two of them have sex. Now, at this point, you know nothing about either of them, except that they are well dressed and live in apparent comfort. Since nothing about the characters or the relationship has been established, watching them get it on really adds nothing to the experience. Perhaps this is the director's way of telegraphing that Eliska is a modern girl - she has sex! In 1943! - but since you don't know if they are married or not, that revelation is saved for later.
And then - poof - within just a few minutes, Eliska's life in Prague and with her lover is over anyway, and she has to go into hiding for her work with the resistance. Joza, man she has nursed back to health from a sawmill accident is persuaded to take her back to his little mountain town and marry her. There she can live relatively freely. Eliska goes, but she's not happy about it or gracious. She grieves for her former life and is contemptuous of Joza and the villagers.
The rest of the movie is more or less a series of not-very-interconnected village stories that involve Eliska and Joza in some respect. Village life is hard; poverty is ever-present. Some neighbors are kind, but the village is also filled with the usual domestic malice: abuse, rape, alcoholism, intolerance. One man hounds Eliska for sex, even as she is falling for her new husband. It's a hard place to be a woman, a place with the constant threat of victimization hanging overhead. Eliska, for all of her education and modern ways, only survives it; it's unclear whether she grows from her interaction with the villagers or not. Those relationships go largely unexplored, with the exception of the one she makes with the local midwife/healer.
The central conflict of the movie - will she learn to value Joza and village life over her former life - is never satisfactorily resolved because in the final moments of the movie, tragedy happens and Eliska doesn't have to decide. Which makes the what precedes this - all of those more-or-less interconnected stories - seem rather pointless.
Eliska's relationship with Joza is never delved into either. In the beginning she is repulsed by him, but after a few quickly managed modifications - his bathing and his putting in a new floor for her - she finds him good enough to bed. Their relationship develops over time to become tender and supportive, but the basis of their love, why exactly they connect outside of pure proximity, never gets explained.
Finally, anyone looking for a remotely happy ending should be forewarned. The last twenty minutes are a splash of unexpected violence and several sympathetic characters die and pointlessly.
Points must be given for the unusual choice of making the village priest a good and holy, though human, individual, but overall this a flawed piece.