Zelary (Czech Republic 2003, 148 min, dir: Ondrej Trojan, cast: Ana Geislerova, Gyorgy Csehaimi)

Do all of us want to walk through an unmarked door into a secret life better than the one we thought we wanted? Eliska/Hana has two names in Zelary because she has two lives. One is as the big city hospital nurse who assists her surgeon boyfriend in saving the life of a rough country peasant by giving him a transfusion of her own blood.

That is before the Gestapo gets wise to the hospital staff’s resistance activities. Suddenly, that night, she must flee. It has all been arranged. She will accompany the peasant laborer she helped save back to his mountain village. There she will pose as his wife until the war is over.

The best war movies are about uprooted people and the generous acts by strangers who preserve the flame of life and compassion. The best of these stories must sometimes age with the storytellers. Kveta Lagatova didn’t think of writing a book until she was in her 80s. Then she took out a story she had written thirty or forty years before, based on what she had heard when she was a schoolteacher in the isolated mountain region were Joza (Janda) takes his new bride, Hana (known as Eliska before she went into hiding).

“The characters there (in the mountains) have very sharp contours, that which elsewhere is not so well-defined” commented Kveta. Her book, Jozova Hanule, became a best seller in the Czech Republic and the basis of Zelary. Like Hana in the movie, Kveta witnessed a culture that hadn’t change is a century, and would soon disappear with the rush to modernity.

Zelray is a love story, large and romantic, about the most unlikely lovers in a place far removed from history. Yet it makes its own history. The tragedy of the ending, and Hana/Eliska’s return, reminds me of the ending of Akira Kurosawa‘s Dersu Uzala. Both films confront their protagonists with the loss of something wild and free not only in the wilderness, but also in themselves. They know it can never be replaced. They mourn for themselves.

Their tragedy is ours too, because we’ve all joined a more civilized world. It is even more perplexing to us because our choice was also for survival: of a kind just as necessary as in the forests and mountains. Hana can never go back, and she knows it. Could Kveta Lagatova have written this book as a young woman? Kurosawa was in his sixties when he directed Dersu.

Perhaps only a lifetime lived through the 20^th Century could connect the brutality of the Nazis-feared as the destroyers of civilization; to the destruction of nature and traditional life actually caused by civilization. These two films are my idea of an amazing double feature.