Zelary
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Movie Reviews of Zelary
Movie Review: Picturesque; Disappointing; Women and Peasants Cheated by Director
Summary: 4 Stars
WARNING THIS REVIEW WILL REVEAL THE ENDING OF THE MOVIE. PLEASE STOP READING NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW HOW "ZELARY" ENDS.
"Zelary" is a very picturesque movie that offers a glimpse into peasant life in Czechoslovakia during World War II.
It's a bit boring, though, and disappointing, because the filmmaker can't conceive of women or peasants as having any interesting internal life worth devoting film stock to.
So, in this film that centers around a woman and a village full of peasants, the narrative drive is all but absent, and the movie consists of unconnected vignettes, rather than a powerful, coherent plot that powers the film from first frame to last.
The viewer feels that he does not have to pay attention, and he doesn't. Peasants singing, peasants picking berries, peasants getting drunk, attempting to rape their neighbors, attending mass -- it's just one big diorama.
There is a character with some internal life. He is male, and he is white collar and educated. He's the town school teacher. It's clear: director Ondrej Trojan can do scenes with some complexity; he just doesn't want to do those scenes for female or peasant characters.
I missed "Zelary" when it played in local theaters. I had really wanted to catch this tale of a city girl forced to hide out in the hut of a crude villager, as my mother is from Czechoslovkia, and some of the best years of my life have been spent in villages like Zelary -- high, impoverished, and remote. And I've had a relationship similar to the one depicted in the movie.
Unbeknownst to director Trojan, real life, exciting life, life and plots as driven and demanding as in any city, *do* take place in small villages. In the same way that an urban character, or a man, can be the rewarding and relentless focus of a carefully unreeling plot, women and peasants can, as well.
Problem: many former Soviet bloc men felt emasculated by Nazi, and then Communist, invasions and imperiums, and dealt with this by dehumanizing women -- they established a heirarchy in which they could find someone to feel superior to.
That's what happens here. The female lead is made to pose without clothing in the movie's very first, and utterly gratuitous, scene. Hana, the woman the entire movie revolves around is, in that scene, reduced to nothing more than the object that rewards pathetic viewers in a peep show. It's hard to identify with such a debased and cheapened character / actress.
Hana's never given a chance to redeem herself. She is shown aiding the resistance, but only at the directive of men, who operate her as if she were a marionette.
Nazis close in; she is sent, again, by men, to a remote village, where she is forced, again, by men, to marry Joza, a local villager.
That this villager is unmarried defies credulity. In any case ... this is not the last time this peasant is manipulated to serve "Zelary'"s plot, such as it is.
Hana is resistant to consummation of this forced marriage, until Joza, the much older peasant, lays, for her, wooden planks over his dirt floor, and then bathes. This is enough for her to consummate the forced marriage.
"Zelary" opened by exploiting its female lead -- both the character and the actress playing her -- as if she were a prostitute; in the marriage consummation scene, it utterly betrays her.
This character, we have been told, is a resistance fighter, and a medical student. Would she really have relations with a man she otherwise can't stand for such poorly motivated reasons? What a low view of women Ondrej Trojan, the filmmaker, has. The connotation of Trojan's last name in American slang is all too appropriate.
And that's as much development as the central story gets. The film becomes a series of disconnected, soul-less tableaux of village life.
One can't help but think of Peter Weir's far superior film on a similar theme, "Witness." In that movie, Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis play an urban cop and an Amish widow who must share a farmhouse in a remote, rural scene. "Witness" works slowly, carefully, to reveal their characters, and their growing love.
For a movie like "Witness" to work so hard to reveal human character, and to drive a plot with that revelation, the director has to believe that his characters have inner life.
Trojan has no such belief. He treats his characters as superficial dolls. They are worthwhile as wearers of colorful peasant costumes; they are worthwhile, if female, when not wearing anything at all, and in one of the movie's many, many, rape scenes.
In the cheapest move of all, Trojan sacrifices one of his characters for sheer convenience's sake, to eliminate the need to plumb the depths of the two people who've been onscreen for more than two hours.
The war ends. The Nazis are defeated. Hana is released. She can leave the hamlet she once hated, Zelary. She can leave the older, crude peasant man. He says as much to her: "You can go now. If not today, then tomorrow, or next week."
She says nothing. And, then, Joza is shot dead. How convenient!
Joza managed to survive years of Nazi occupation, in spite of hiding a wanted resistance fighter, living in his house in plain sight, and the day she can leave him, the day that demands that the filmmaker give his despised female character and lowly peasant character some complexity, some inner life, the filmmaker makes it easy on himself, eliminates the need for any probing exploration of the humanity of his characters, and shoots one of them dead.
Cheap. And disappointing.
Women, and peasants, deserve better.
Movie Review: Very satisfying and well directed
Summary: 4 Stars
As long as there are wars and womenfolk to revere, the feisty spirit of Scarlett O'Hara will never die. The story of a privileged beauty who is transformed by war and sacrifice into a paragon of resilience keeps popping up in film: Catherine Deneuve in Indochine (1992), Sandrine Bonnaire in East-West (1999), Nicole Kidman in last year's Cold Mountain.
Zelary is the Czech version, an old-fashioned character-driven domestic epic which was adapted from an novel by Kveta Legatova. Set in the Second World War against the background of the German occupation, the film was selected as the Czech Republic's Oscar nomination last year. A return to directing for Ondrej Trojan (Let's All Sing Around) after more than a decade as a producer, Zelary is a trite but sturdy offering, a showcase for popular young Czech actress Anna Geislerova, as well as the beautiful Moravian countryside, shot in glowing earthy tones.
Geislerova plays Eliska, a medical student who has been denied a chance to finish her degree because of the German occupation. She works as a nurse, but is also involved in the resistance movement with her lover, a surgeon named Richard (Ivan Trojan). One night a sawmill worker, Joseph (Hungarian actor Gyorgy Cserhalmi), from a rural community is brought into the hospital badly injured. Eliska provides the blood he needs for a transfusion. Shortly after, the Gestapo uncovers the resistance group that Eliska belongs to and she is forced to escape. Joseph, or Jova for short, agrees to take her back to his rural village of Zelary.
Initially the conditions, a dirt floor and no running water, shock her but she has no choice but to stay. She takes on an assumed identity, as Hana, and goes through a marriage ceremony to avoid suspicion from the local villagers.
Hana becomes acclimatized to her new housewifely life surprisingly quickly as she discovers, as women so often do in romance novels, that a hulking, taciturn man can meet nearly all her needs. Jova proves himself both a font of compassion and pillar of strength, providing Hana with a wooden floor and defending her from a rapist before they eventually become lovers.
While Hana bonds with her woodcutter, the script provides some welcome additional village texture. There's that Czech cinema staple, the precocious child (Anna Vertelarova) and her pragmatic widowed mother, as well as a bureaucratic school principal and his friend, a compassionate priest. There's also an ancient midwife (Jaroslava Adamova) who teaches Hana folk medicine. The most trenchant subplot concerns the local drunk who beats his wife and son: Their imprisonment serves as a contrast to the caring imprisonment that Hana faces.
The German army, lurking in the nearby hills, pops up periodically to add a jolt of suspense. Unfortunately, Zelary doesn't end with the war.
Soon the ruthless Germans are replaced by the loutish, drunken, raping soldiers of the Soviet army and Zelary is in for a whole new round of problems. By this point -- well past the two-hour mark -- the endlessly episodic nature of Eliska/Hana's trials begins to provoke fatigue more than sympathy. "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart," wrote the poet William Butler Yeats. And too much history can make any long-suffering heroine overstay her welcome. Conrad Alton, Filmbay Editor.
Movie Review: Book to film . . .
Summary: 4 Stars
The length and complexity of this ambitious Czech film (exteriors were shot in Slovakia) reveal its literary origins as a novel about a young woman with connections to the Resistance who is whisked away into hiding during the Nazi occupation of Prague. She quickly must adjust to life in a mountain village far from the urbane milieu she has been used to. And she must also adjust to the villager whom she must marry in order to preserve her new identity. It's a romantic film (in the scale of David Lean) with sweeping vistas of mountain scenery in all seasons of the year, a large cast of supporting characters, and frequent reminders of the perilous state in which they all live, as the Nazi occupiers are continually searching out partisans and their sympathizers.
A smaller film would no doubt have focused more on the evolving relationship between the educated and thoroughly modern young woman and her much older sawmill worker of a husband, whose tentativeness with her (and need for a bath) account in part for the fact that he is still a bachelor in mid-life. The two leads provide some nuanced scenes marking the evolution of their relationship, but in an effort to portray more of the village life that's the context of their story, there is a host of other characters and subplots, many of them written in a kind of shorthand that verges on stereotype. So a viewer can often feel a step ahead of the film, anticipating what we've been set up to expect, and its 2.5 hour length can seem rather more than that.
Winner of many awards, it was not surprisingly nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Film in 2003 (the winner was Pedro Almodovar's "Talk To Her"). And it definitely rewards the viewing, particularly as it attempts to portray a way of life that the modern world in 1943 had left behind - and in the performances of its two leads, who make an improbable love affair confidently plausible. The DVD includes an informative "making of" featurette.
Movie Review: Love redefined
Summary: 4 Stars
There are two films I can think of where the marriage theme would give any woman shivers. One is "Queen Margot" and the other "Zelary". "Zelary" story is placed in Chech Republic during WWII. The main female character is helping resistance and before long she is betrayed to Gestapo. To escape certain death, she is hidden in the rural area of the country where no one knows her true identity. To make sure she blends well with the locals, local priest, schoolmaster and her protector decide that the best thing to do in this situation is to marry her off to a local peasant. So here we have a former medical student, sophisticated and raised in the city, forced to marry a man she barely knows who seemingly has nothing in common with her. As time passes by and they get to know each other, they eventually fall in love with each other. I had a little problem with the way their relationship ends (a little bit too convenient for the purposes of the story closure, in my opinion). This is definitely a story of two people so different in every respect who fall in love with each other. It is almost as if the fact that the plot is setup during a WWII is more of a convenient background than anything else.Movie Review: Survival!
Summary: 4 Stars
Needless to say, war brings out the best and worst in people. A young, sophisticated medical student finds herself in a small village, hiding from her past and her associations during The War, when her country was occupied by Nazis. She became a part of the community, and on the way found gentleness and kindness in one of the local villagers.
The German occupiers had a method in their actions, although their cruelty was legion. On the other hand, the partisans were undisciplined, and many of them went around drunk and stupid much of the time.
This story places all of these elements together, and shows the senselessness of it all, emphasizing the warmth that developed beteween the two protagonists. This is a good movie, happy and sad, with survival as its main theme. A recommended view.