Ondrej Trojan’s Zelary, like Caroline Link’s Nowhere in Africa, is beautifully photographed but frustratingly straightforward. In both films, women are banished to far-off lands where they cling to a familiar but no longer functional ethos. Elizka (Anna Geislerová) is a resistance fighter working as a nurse in a Czech hospital. Shortly before the Nazi occupation, she gives blood to a poor countryman, Joza (Anna Geislerová), an act of good faith that permits the man to take her to the countryside when her resistance group is discovered and Elizka’s lover, Richard (Ivan Trojan), demands that she goes into hiding.
In Zelary, Elizka encounters a community frozen in time and whose citizens regularly deal with Old Testament doom and gloom—certainly the Nazis are the least of their troubles with men beating their women, the threat of rape hanging in the air, and a cloying street urchin out-sermonizing the local preacher. Forced to marry Joza, Elizka comes to terms with the way things work in the countryside and soon finds herself living out everyone’s melodramas, falling in love with Joza and tending to the wounds of people who probably don’t deserve to live.
Because Trojan spends so very little time setting up Elizka’s way of life in the film’s Czech urban center, the cosmopolitan girl’s conversion into a country mouse isn’t exactly a memorable one. And if we never get a clear grasp of who she was before coming to Zelary, or the importance of the people and things she left behind, watching her cope with the elements and bestial relations in the country is like watching her play a game of poker without the ante.
Considering the blood ties that permit Elizka’s trip to the country, also frustrating is Trojan’s failure to show how life in Zelary changes Elizka after the war. Still, if you ignore the film’s almost superfluous bookends and look only at the scenes set in Zelary, Trojan paints an ethereal portrait of a self-destructive Eden on the brink of moral and cultural collapse.
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