Zelary | Review

Czech nomie proves that big production dollars doesn’t always produce better results.

Championed as one of the five final nominated features for Best Foreign Language Film of 2004, this Czech import scripted by Petr Jarchovský’s take from the Jozova Hanule novel is an adaptation that on the surface looks first-rate but it clumsily builds a full story arch of events that fail to reach for the viewer’s jugular.

Closely resembling its German cousin in Best Foreign Language Film winner of 2003 Nowhere in Africa, this dramatic account demonstrates how displacement and survival instincts vary from one individual to another. Primarily shot in the contrasting colors of the seasons of the Eastern-European countryside, this WWII Czechoslovakian tale features a woman in the mist of major transformation and the text focuses on the acclimatization to her new life and new surroundings. In a nutshell, this is about a former resistance fighter who loses her fighter’s edge but regains it once she learns that life is actually worth living, especially when a new husband provides a new wooden floor and acts as anti-rape guard to warn off stray human dogs. Actor György Cserhalmi plays Joza, a character that agrees to pose as her new husband, the older man who is unfamiliar with soap bravely defends her against village beasts and helps protect against a dozen Russian fighters from the front who easily go over the alcohol limit and just happen to be insanely trigger-happy.

With occasional spurts of violence, director Ondrej Trojan’s soft drama establishes itself as a sweeping period piece for the mountains set with steam trains, necessary costume design and wood-burning stoves, but ultimately Zelary is a film that gets stuck in one too many ‘designed’, fade-to-black moments. The lack of developed character description results in the sort of makeover that come about in Hollywood comedies, here the city woman trades in her nail polish and better living for a broom, a dog and a set of unflattering, un-matching clothes. If Kidman’s Grace showed the punishing process of adapting to new surroundings in (Dogville), then Anna Geislerová’s character has it easy, it barely registers the radar and thus gives an unaffecting transformation from Eliska into Hana. It lacks the burdened emotional clout that is initially proposed, Trojan fails to get into the psychology of this character and once the character finally ‘settles’ in, the film abandons her for other unimportant anecdotes and the story of a child living in the woods. The film’s brutal ‘wrap-up’ ending doesn’t tell the anything about the character, – except that she obviously moved away because she now she is more fashionably conscious. It’s a trip back down memory lane ending that as no merit or purpose.

Zelary is simply a wartime story that goes through the motions, asks its protagonist to go through a catalogue of emotions but doesn’t evoke the type of authentic survivalist story that one would expect with the casualties of war.

Viewed in original Czech language with English subtitles. (Montreal World Film Festival)

Rating 1.5 stars