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Yet the magic of the film is that it does not labor under over-worked historical references but instead tells a finely acted and beautifully shot story about both good and bad-hearted villagers trying to make the best of life in the inimitably Czech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.
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.