User reviews

A deep and lasting love does not always fit our pictures and indeed can arise from the most unlikely circumstances. In Zelary, a Czech film by Ondrej Trojan, an abiding romance between a rugged sawmill worker and a sophisticated medical student emerges from the conflict in Czechoslovakia during World War II. Based on the autobiographical novel Jozova Hanule by Kveta Legatova, Zelary is about a young medical student who is forced to live in a remote mountain village in order to escape the Gestapo. It is a film that poignantly depicts the upheaval of war and how people had to call upon their hidden resources simply to survive.

Set in May 1943 when the Germans, under the guise of a protectorate, occupied Bohemia and Moravia, Aliska (Ana Geislerova), a student in Prague, works as a nurse in a provincial hospital after the Nazis close the universities. As the film opens, she is having an affair with Richard (Ivan Trojan), a successful surgeon. Both are members of the Czech resistance movement along with their superior at the hospital. When a planned underground operation fails, Richard is forced to emigrate and Eliska is given a new identity and safe passage to live out the war in the mountain village of Zelary with Joza (Gyorgy Cserhalmi), a patient at the hospital whose life was saved by Eliska's blood donation.

It is clear from the outset that her adjustment to rural life will take time. Upon reaching the cottage after a long journey, she asks, "Where's the yard?" "Everywhere", he replies, She has a hard time living in an area without electricity or plumbing and goats running freely but, given the alternative, she doesn't complain. Eliska, now known as Hana, is met with suspicion by the residents of Zelary who wonder where Joza found her, but she is eventually accepted when she agrees to a marriage of convenience with Joza and begins to integrate herself into the life of the community. At a length of 150 minutes, the film becomes an epic of Hana's gradual adjustment to rural life while living in daily fear of her discovery by the Gestapo. At first, she is reluctant to let Joza touch her but he gradually wins her trust with his gentle manner and she comes to rely on him as her means of protection. In one touching scene, he gently bathes Hana after finding her bruised and drenched in a violent rainstorm.

While Zelary has its tender moments, it is not an idyllic romp through the Czech countryside. The village has its share of drunkenness, abusive husbands, and violent confrontations between parents and children and Hana has to learn to deal with them. In one subplot, the schoolteacher Tkac (Jaroslav Dusak), a strict disciplinarian, constantly berates a young boy named Lipka (Tomas Zatecka) who has problems at home. Lipka leaves the school and is forced to hide in a cave to escape his abusive stepfather (Ondrej Koval), aided only by his friend, Helenka (Anna Vertelarova), a five-year-old girl. As the war refuses to go away, both Hana and Joza have to deal with fear and sudden death, and they both become increasingly resourceful and self-reliant. Hana forms a strong bond with the local midwife, Lucka (Jaraslov Adamova) who teaches her about herbal remedies and allows her to help with the medical needs of the community, exacerbated by the sudden presence of voracious Russian troops.

Zelary does not break any new ground and some of the minor characters are one-dimensional, yet the film reaches us on an emotional level because of its sincerity and disdain for sentimentality. Nominated at the 2003 Oscars for Best Foreign-Language Film, the film is greatly enhanced by the compelling performances of both Geislerova and Cserhalmi, a Hungarian-born actor who exudes both physical and emotional strength. Though I would have liked to learn more about Aliska before and after the war and how her experiences had changed her, Zelary succeeds by transcending limitations of time and place and speaking directly to the human heart.

This magnificent film arrives way too late after it was nominated for the best foreign movie of 2003! Important European movies don't have the great market they should have in America, even though, this picture is better than some of the local fare. Director Ondrej Trojan must be congratulated for what he has done with this movie.

The story begins in 1943, at the time where Europe was going through one of the worst moments of WWII. The Germans are everywhere and the Gestapo is the instrument to eliminate the people that are working in the resistance. When the young medical student and nurse, Eliska, is found to be in danger, she is send to the country with one of the patients she has been taking care at the hospital. Thus begins the saga of a woman who must hide, or face jail, or probably death.

The movie then changes to a pastoral setting when Joza, the peasant who has been kind enough to take Eliska to his farm, agrees to marry her in conspiracy with the local priest and the school teacher. That part of the country is catholic and backward. There is a hypocrisy in the way this teacher and priest keep a closed eye about what the local peasantry are doing. On the one hand, the peasants appear to be God loving citizens, but they live lives dominated by alcohol, rape, incest, and other evil practices. No one questions anything.

Joza enters in the marriage out of gratitude toward the nurse that helped him heal his wounds. Then, steadily, he falls in love with a woman who is completely different from him. In turn, Hana, as she is now named, starts seeing in Joza qualities she has taken for granted. Their love is genuine.

The two principals, Anne Geislerova and Gyorgi Cserhalmi are wonderful in that make us believe they are these two people that get to know and love one another under the worst possible circumstances.

The countryside where the film was filmed is so beautiful that it makes one wonder how could war have been waged in such surroundings. The magnificent cinematography of the picture takes us back to those sad years of the war, and what that country endured as a Soviet satellite nation.

Zelary is yet,another good find at the library for me. I hadn't heard of this film and I was sort of taken in by the unusual title. I watched it over 2 nights because I started the first 1/2 of the film kind of late. Otheriwse,I'd have sat straight through it.

While it's true that there are elements in the film that have been used in other World War 2 dramas,that's a very small thing compared to the grandeur of the movie.

It's (as mentioned in the DVD extra's) a love story. Two people get married to protect her from the Nazi's,who would have her executed for working against them. Sort of a marriage of convenience. What starts as something she's not looking forward too,blossoms into love between the two. Despite him being almost 30 years older.

We see little of the German threat here but we know it exists,along with the threat of a young man wanting his way with her or he'll turn her in.

The movie is more about how she truly becomes as one of the of the small village. The villagers are not 2 dimensional as someone mentioned,they are exactly as people were back then in the 1940s and farther back as well. The scenery is breathtaking and real which helps make it look as it did in that era as well.

I feel all the actors did a fine job for a film that took 1 year and 2 months to complete. That long because they wanted authentic time and aging to happen,for a better sense of realism.

It's nothing ground breaking but it was a very fine film to watch and become fully engrossed in.

9 stars,purely for being a good movie,with good drama and heart,as well as entertainment value. (END}

Following similar themes as "Cold Mountain" this official Oscar submission from the Czech Republic is a masterful war time drama with a great heart. Heart-breaking and warm, it carries those themes to a much richer conclusion than "Cold Mountain" was able to. if this film is not one of the Foreign Language film nominees then something is clearly amiss. See it!

For those who are fans of foreign films, this is a must. The scenery alone is enough reason to watch this movie. This was cast very well. The two main characters were outstanding as well as the children actors. The little girl reminds me of Natalie Wood when she was in Miracle on 34th street. The journey of the film takes one through every emotion in the book. Though it is slower paced, it allows one to reflect and bond with the characters. It's not a relaxing film as there is this underlying tension caused by the uncertainty of a country torn by war. Overall, an excellent film. Bravo to the director and all the crew! Outstanding job. I look forward to many more great films out of Czechoslovakia.

Kerry Johnson

Set in Eastern Europe during the Nazi occupation, this is the story of a young, urbane, freedom fighter woman who faces discovery and capture every day in the big city. When the heat gets too high, her leaders suddenly send her away, to lessen the risk on her and everyone else. She just as suddenly finds herself with people she does not know, understand, or even like – who make decisions for her in an isolated, "backward" mountain village. How could life get any worse? What is her reason for living any longer? Well, she will see… she will see... one hard day at a time. This is a quietly powerful film, full of natural grandeur, human pettiness, the ebb and flow of pain and pleasure, forgiveness and revenge, taking and giving, and faith and hopelessness. "Zelary" is epic in scope, and full of Life's lessons. It lacks nothing.

An excellent movie with a beautiful, complex setting. I would call it a classic tragedy, though the only possible flaw of the tragic hero Joza is his selflessness in helping others. It is great to see a movie involving WWII that is not just a war movie and is from a fresh perspective, rather than from one of the major players in the War. The scenery is beautifully natural and the characters will move you to sympathize with them. While it does not have a picture-perfect happy ending, I was encouraged by the redemption and heroism of the young boy Lipka. There are several miscommunications and accidents throughout the movie that support its realism. I will definitely read the novel Jozova Hanule now, on which the movie is based.

"Zelary" follows Eliska, a beautiful, young Czech woman through the course of her life during WWII as she is torn from her nursing work and antifascist movement support in the city to be secreted in a rustic mountain community where she finds herself having to cope with the tribulations of a hard rural life, a husband required to legitimize her presence as a cover, and the throes of a war which spills over onto the mountain villagers from both fronts. This slow moving 2:20 hour film pans the gamut of rural life in war torn Czechoslovakia as it looks wistfully at the bucolic beauty and plaintively at the juxtaposed evils of war showing us life, death, love, birth, hardship, evil, and more. An Oscar nominated Czech film with easy subtitles, "Zelary" is sometimes tedious, sometimes riveting, and always full of heart. Should be a pleasant watch for more mature audiences into the foreign film fringe. (B)

During Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, a nurse who is part of the resistance movement flees to the countryside to avoid persecution. There are good performances from Geislerova as the nurse and Cserhalmi as the uneducated fellow she marries to help change her identity. As long as the movie is focusing on their relationship, it works fine. However, the script is all over the place, with secondary threads on an abusive drunkard, a school principal, a priest, a delinquent boy, a precocious girl, a man moving in with his daughter-in-law, etc. The filmmakers apparently were intent on making an epic, but the result is a good-looking but dreary film that goes on far too long.

This is one of the great movies of my lifetime! Passionate directing; a superb cast; a brilliant script and gorgeous scenery leave an indelible memory of my Zelary experience. Those who love Hitchcock will appreciate the suspense and intrigue. Those who love chick flicks will endear to the passion and feelings elicited. But Zelary is not a "chick flick" in the true sense. It's a heart-wrenching story of lovers separated and who go on with their lives to survive. It's the life you make when you have little choices. It's about making the best of that life. And it's about the memories generated over a lifetime. A movie to be enjoyed by all ages and especially by true movie lovers.

When I originally wrote this comment, I predicted Zelary are on their way to Oscar for the best foreign motion picture of 2003. As we now know, this prediction was wrong. Nothwithstanding that, I have to say that when I saw this movie for the second time on Czech TV on 1 January 2006 I have absolutely no reason to change a word in my below comment. Perhaps the strongest 10/10s I have ever given.

I may be a little bit biased observer, since I am Czech local, but there are many great Czech films. The problem is that a vast majority of them are not understandable to international audience because they deal with specific Czech matters and the storytelling is primarily aimed at Czech audience. Then they are few that avoid this trap and may be interesting and appealing to movie viewers across the globe. Zelary definitely pertain to the latter group.

It happened by coincidence that I have seen two great movies somehow connected with World War II in a very short time. First was the Pianist a brilliant work of Roman Polanski, second is Zelary. Although may not seem so at first sight these two movies have a lot in common. The similarity lies in the basis of the story and in the way the story is told. Both these movies successfully try to portray awful times of World War II through a human destiny. They tell a story about human whose life was broke into pieces by war. Pianist Szpilman must have been hiding for several years, the main character of Zelary, Hana, must disappear from the city and attention of Gestapo to rural mountain forgotten area. Both survive, Hana in addition finds a new life.

But enough of comparisons, Zelary are also distinguished for wonderful cinematography, perfect music and excellent acting of the recent top-class Czech and Hungarian actors. If this movie ever comes near you either to the movie theater or on DVD or video, it is definitely worth while. 10/10

Ondřej Trojan's Academy Award-nominated "Želary" focuses on Eliška, a nurse in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia (called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia). After the Nazis learn of her role in the resistance, Eliška has to flee to the countryside with a man to whom she donated blood. They hide out in a village timelocked in the 1800s. Eliška has to stay there for the duration of the war, and certain events in the village will have an effect on her for the rest of her life.

The movie makes perfectly clear what a hard life it was for the people living under occupation. It couldn't have been easy in a rural setting either. But whatever the case, it's a fine movie. The main credit should go to Anna Geislerová (who won a well deserved Czech Lion) as Eliška, but the rest of the cast does well also. I've never seen a Czech movie that I disliked. In addition to this one, I recommend Trojan's "Divided We Fall", which also focuses on the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia.

Pravda vítězí!

This film is worth seeing, but is much too long. It felt like a TV mini-series! The first half hour could have been chopped completely. Her work in the city with the underground or "resistance" is nothing we haven't seen before, and it's not even that dramatic. Her trip to the country is even less so. The viewer also has no emotional involvement with the heroine right at the beginning. It's really just "filler" that could have been achieved in other ways. I think the film would have worked better picking up the action from when the village priest meets with them before the marriage. The whole point of the movie is her adaptation to the village life, and the real relationship that develops with her husband from its "forced" beginnings. The film reminded me of another great Czech film called Divided We Fall, also set in WWII and about ordinary people going to extraordinary lengths to protect others. The films share an actor, Jaraslav Dusek, who plays Tkac the school-teacher, and the nosy,"go with the flow" German "sympathaser" friend in Divided. (Actually, his role is rather minor and probably could have been cut as well.) The casting is uniformly superb, including the little girl and delinquent boy, the film gets better as it moves along and is better than any similar Hollywood attempts, but could have been even more powerful.

One more movie seen at the Montreal World Film Festival.

Zelary is the World War II story of a nurse who has to hide from the Gestapo in the countryside and even 'marries' a peasant. The movie has excellent actors, beautiful cinematography and music. I enjoyed the movie but at the same time I had a feeling of déjà vu – you'll be reminded of Sommersby, Le Retour de Martin Guerre, Cold Mountain, and The English Patient.

The interesting aspect of the movie is that it focuses on life in the country as if the war was really distant. There are actually only 2 interruptions by the Nazis. Also, the return of local soldiers once the war ends and its implications for the community is well-portrayed. The cute little girl adds some youth and humor to the movie. Her conversation with the local priest is a delight!

Overall, a good movie. 7/10

Zelary (2003), directed by Ondrej Trojan, is an variation on the theme of a person thrown into an environment for which he or she is not prepared. In this case, the protagonist Eliska (Anna Geislerová) is a beautiful, sophisticated nurse in Prague during the German occupation. Forced to escape from Prague, Eliska finds herself in a remote Czech farming village.

In this setting, her urban knowledge and social skills are inadequate for survival. Predictably, her basic intelligence and her nursing experience do, indeed prove useful. However, without help from the people in the community, she can't possibly survive. Whether her abilities--and the assistance of the villagers--will prove adequate to ensure survival is the question around which the plot revolves.

The weakness of the film is that Eliska's transition into her role as the wife of a farmer is far from adequate. Anna Geislerová is so refined and elegant that it would have taken more than two long braids to fool the Germans (or anyone else).

Still, the concept is interesting, and the film does well in conveying the complexities and difficulties that confront a stranger in an apparently tranquil rural community.

This wonderful film almost lost me in the opening scene which is devoted to some explicitly athletic sex. Oh dear... just another European skin flick.... Well!!! It turned out to be one of the finest films I've ever seen. The acting is superb, even watching it with subtitles. Even more impressive is the artful photography. Every shot is carefully and creatively composed and staged. The colour, for day and night, summer and winter, sunny and grey, is like that from a master's palette. The superb camera work is enough in itself to make this a memorable movie. Then, near the beginning, there are wonderful scenes of an antique steam train. As a train buff, a war buff and a photography buff, I was close to nirvana. This is a film Hollywood producers should watch to learn how it should be done. I have but one criticism. At over two hours, it runs a little long.

"Zelary" fits into two new sometimes intersecting genres of World War II films that reinterpret history as inspired by true stories -- Eastern European ones that claim their territory was full of anti-Nazi Resistance conspirators and protesters and Western romantic ones that exaggerate women's roles, as exemplified in the recent "Charlotte Gray" and "Rosenstrasse."

Both genres tend to focus on the deprivations of noble gentiles rather than the genocide of the Jews. In "Zelary" we only hear in passing about "those who left." Gee, I wonder who had to leave.

We follow a sophisticated medical student as she flees the city and her doctor lover co-conspirator because of their clandestine courier activities.

Her escape to the countryside and arranged cover marriage to a kindly lug seems to dumb down her brain through the beautifully changing seasons as her very long sojourn in a primitive village is peopled with what in the U.S. would be hillbilly, peasant stereotypes of tolerated drunkards, abusers, rapists, pedophiles and idiots such that I could not figure out why the Nazis bothered to patrol every now and then. So not only do we get the usual Paris Hilton in the boonies incompetencies, but she forgets her education during this idyll and is taught from scratch by the local midwife.

We do get some flashes of protective women's solidarity among some independent women, especially with only some of the menfolk off to war and the ones who are left ravaged by alcohol, but people's motivations are pretty inscrutable, including why all it takes is a nice bath to make her sham marriage genuine, in scenes very like "Under the Sun." Or maybe it's just her falling into the native fatalism that pervades the village and grounds down the movie as well.

The drama perks up towards the conclusion in a touch of "Cold Mountain" as the bloody chaos of the war's ending portends worse problems with the Russians than they had with the Nazis.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film. I thought it was not only well-written but quite visually interesting. I found the character of Hana particularly endearing. In fact, I wrote about her in an essay I'm doing on the idea of 'home' in literature and some film: Zelary was mentioned before as having thematic elements involving a physical home. However, this film takes a slightly different approach to the aspects of home. Whereas one normally would define home for his or herself, then make some sort of journey to find it; Hana is forced to do things oppositely in Zelary. Because turmoil physically forces her out of the place she had come to call home, she must redefine home for herself in order to make her current setting her new home. She succeeds in this through accepting the rural lifestyle and falling in love with her new husband, and she even manages to go back to her old home once again. This reversal of the task of defining home is what creates the central conflict in the film, and Hana's flexibility in making home a solid place is what makes her a strong protagonist.

ZELARY (2003) is a small gem of a film that can stand up beside the great Czech classics of the 1960's – FIREMAN'S BALL and CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS. Using what is perhaps the Czech national literary character trait of understatement, director Ondrej Trojan crafts a richly detailed story about one woman's struggle to survive in a remote village during the WWII anti-Nazi resistance. Her small and compelling story stands on its own, but also subtly telegraphs the major themes of recent Czech history to those who can still read the coded language that East European artists from Kafka onward have trademarked.

Viewers familiar with the twentieth-century Czech struggle as an emerging nation dominated by successive empires – Austro-Hungarian, Nazi and Soviet – will detect the larger themes that Trojan evokes in a narrative centered around the Czech anti-Nazi resistance: the threat of collective punishment, the ever-present dangers of betrayal, petty revenge and arbitrary violence in a values-corrupting totalitarian system, and the crushing of religion under communism. The iconic Czech resistance story – the assassination of Hitler's East European viceroy, Heydrich, by British-trained Czech commandos and the Nazi's retaliatory obliteration of the town of Lidice and all its inhabitants – is never directly mentioned but hovers just outside the frame, as does the brutality of post-war Soviet domination after 1948.

Yet the magic of the film is that it does not labor under over-worked historical references but instead tells a finely acted and beautifully shot story about both good and bad-hearted villagers trying to make the best of life – in the inimitably Czech tradition of the Good Soldier Shveik – despite the absurd and arbitrary twists of fate created by war and evil empires. Trojan manages to craft an uplifting story about love and loss, resilience and sacrifice, that pays tribute to his "greatest generation," even though for the Czechs the WWII "liberation" from the Nazis meant another forty years of Soviet domination behind the Iron Curtain. Even the slightly awkward ending points hopefully toward the brighter future that Czech's rallied for during their 1960's "Prague Spring." What is perhaps most remarkable about ZELARY from a film-making point of view, is that fifteen years after the "Velvet Revolution" freed Czechs (and Slovaks) from the Soviet empire, it still speaks in the understated ironies and coded references that would have been needed to escape the censor's exacto-knife. Perhaps Trojan is now acutely aware, as an artist working in the free-market economy, that the details of his small country's history don't amount to a hill of beans in the world film market, but can still be subtly embedded for deciphering by his compatriots. Instead, he has constructed a finely crafted love triangle for a global audience that slyly reshuffles the CASABLANCA deck and casts Bogie as a semi-literate woodsman, while Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa is played by the nearly-as-luminous Ana Geislerova. In doing so, he preserves the best of the Samizdat underground literary tradition for film-making in the new global economy.