"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)
