This marvelous film is at once lyric, mournful and mordantly funny in depicting the effects on a rural community when collectivization makes apparatchiks out of nudniks, and enemies out of friends. Novelistic in detail and incident, epic in format, it follows eight characters whose fates are interwoven over twenty years, from the tainted innocence of a postwar spring to the bitter defeat of the so-called "better life." Among them are a farmer-musician with a little of the gypsy in his blood; an earthy Everyman, Frantisek, whose connection to the land makes him a natural leader and a marked man; a beautiful orange-haired widow whose infinitely regenerative love is the kiss of death; a butterfly-collecting church organist (the dour Vlastimil Brodsky) who is forced out of town. Through it all, the village old women watch and comment, like a Greek chorus in babushkas. Jasny and cinematographer Jaroslav Kucera are painters-on-film: a still life in a smoky cafe becomes a wild, 360-degree pan, while, outdoors, in stunningly beautiful images, landscape answers to man's fate. The seasons are unchanging as compared to the winds of change that one can never predict, and for which certain people "can never be ready."