The 70s were a great decade for surrealistic motives and imagery in genre films—including such incredible gems as Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s The Holy Mountain, Louis Malle‘s Black Moon and Dario Argento‘s Suspiria. And then came another great example of surrealist cinema out of Eastern Europe in the form of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. Directed by Jaromil Jires, it was a part of the Czechoslovakian New Wave, but came off as avant-garde and daring even for this pretty liberated movement. The film did face its fair share of obstacles, but ended up reaching a worldwide audience that had seen many versions of a coming-of-age story by that time. However, none of them tackled this topic like this: depicting the weird place between innocent childhood and inevitable adulthood, specifically shown through the perspective of female experience, in such an uncompromisingly surreal way.
What Is ‘Valerie and Her Week of Wonders’ About?
The story starts somewhat realistically as 13-year-old Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová) is living quietly with her grandmother in a small picturesque town. Her mostly ideal existence in a world where it’s permanently summer begins to shatter as a mysterious figure steals her precious earrings while she’s sleeping. Later, the girl encounters a creepy man wearing a marten’s mask—The Constable—and then the thief himself, a seemingly good-natured young man, Orlík, who warns her of an impending danger. The consequent chain of events includes Valerie’s grandmother’s quest to get back her youth with the help of her former lover, The Constable, vampires eager for innocent women’s blood, magical jewelry, threats of being burned at the stake, and hints of incest.
The more the story progresses, the more it noticeably and intentionally loses the coherent narrative thread, making space for increasingly bizarre imagery that is both sensual and scary. Based on a novel by a famous Czech surrealist writer, Vítêzslav Nezval, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders looks and sounds as if Sigmund Freud and Lewis Carroll decided to collaborate on a project with its many symbols—from multiple mirrors that appear throughout the story to blood splattered on daisies. Thanks not only to the visually stunning cinematography, but also a very distinctive, haunting soundtrack that would gain cult fame of its own, the film emphasizes the precipice its young heroine finds herself on—between the familiar oasis of childhood and the adult world that turns out to be sinister.
The World of Adulthood Is a Strange Place, and It Has Teeth
The London premiere of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders was attended by a famous writer, Angela Carter, who was said to enjoy it. In the 80s, Carter would go on to collaborate with director Neil Jordan on a screenplay based on one of her short stories, which would become the cult feminist horror The Company of Wolves. The two films are often compared (sometimes even being shown back to back as part of retrospective programs) for employing similar surrealistic and symbolic aesthetic, folklore motives, and addressing the theme of the sexual awakening of young women in an allegorical way. But while Jordan’s film utilizes werewolves to drive the metaphor of men’s shape-shifting nature home, Jires’ turns to vampire lore.
Blood is an important symbol in the film as it hints not only at the theme of a girl’s physical transformation into a woman and discovering her desires, but also at the world around her discovering her sexuality too. In the beginning, Valerie is fascinated by the impending change in her body, as evident in an early scene in the movie where she watches young women in the lake, focusing on their breasts. Jaroslava Schallerová, who was carefully chosen from about 1,500 girls, emanates this sense of genuine wonder which later transforms into a not-so-pleasant realization about her new reality. The appearance of an unnamed town the story takes place in works to this effect too. The very real town of Slavonice is transformed into a surreal space between a pleasant fantasy and a nightmare.
The world is a hostile place in Jires’ film in general, but especially so towards women. Valerie’s grandmother, Elsa, is a tragic figure, not that different from Demi Moore‘s Elisabeth from The Substance. She is willing to sell her soul and resorts to horrible doings in hopes of looking younger, as society (in the form of her latest lover, priest Gracián) demands. A young woman, Hedvika, enters a marriage only to have her vitality sucked dry by it. And Valerie is confronted by adulthood, a reality full of dangerous men lusting after young women’s blood—both literally and figuratively. Pale blood-sucking monsters in Valerie and Her Week of Wonders represent predatory behavior towards women—the topic that makes this stunning and exquisitely bizarre film from the 1970s so relevant today and comparable to modern horror movies about what it feels like for a girl in this world.
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
- Release Date
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October 16, 1970
- Runtime
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77 Minutes
- Director
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Jaromil Jires
- Writers
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Vitezslav Nezval, Ester Krumbachová, Jaromil Jires, Jirí Musil
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Jaroslava Schallerová
Valerie
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Jirí Prýmek
Tchor-konstábl
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