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.
Review of Zelary
