"Things are only obvious when they're history," says Pavel, the young hero of this engrossing, visually exhilarating study of war, time, and memory. "When you're in the middle of it, you make mistakes." A young Resistance fighter now lying paralyzed, prone in a hospital bed, Pavel views the world through the rear-view mirror his doctor has given him. Thus reflected, the war, which is not yet history, opens up in fevered memories, flashbacks within flashbacks-mistakes within mistakes-that add up to an elliptical, nearly epic narrative. This is a rare picture of the Czechoslovak Resistance as it functioned in a remote village, its mission often riddled with impossible contradictions. But it is also a vividly existential, and thus contemporary, portrait of human endeavor (even death is human), of the commitments and compromises that history demands-particularly in the figure of Marta, a sexual spy in the occupation elite and Pavel's lover. And after the war, one even compromises with disillusionment; the (emotional) paralysis lifts and one cries "It hurts, it hurts-don't stop." The film's haunting mixture of lyrical, almost hallucinatory images and documentary-style recreations, set to musical themes redolent of time and distance, recall Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour (a film which Kadar and Klos in fact had not seen).