This last week, Criterion released Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders.
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| "Hehehehehehe. I'm not really sleeping." |
Lewis Carroll’s satirical fantasy Alice in Wonderland may have had endless rabbit holes,
anthropomorphic creatures, a hookah smoking caterpillar and a looking glass,
but in the recently re-released 1970 Czechoslovakian surreal provocation Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, we’re
thrust deep into a world even stranger, infinitely more subversive and harder
to follow than anything Carroll could have imagined. The tail end of the Czech New Wave which
included the hyperactive Daisies and
the explicit W.R.: Mysteries of the
Organism, loose narrative of a thirteen year old’s budding sexuality as
experienced in a fantasy netherworld of lesbian trysts, sleazy priests, vampires,
witches and surreal pagan rites falls somewhere in the middle. On the one hand it’s loosely based off a 1945
novel by Vitezslav Nezval of a young girl whose earrings possess mythical
powers much to the chagrin of her grandmother and a band of vampires which seem
inspired by Max Schreck. On the other
hand it’s a free-for-all in terms of deliberately disjointed editing, lush
fullscreen cinematography and the whimsically ethereal score by Lubos
Fiser.
Truly a funky odd duck spoken of the same breath as
Nobuhiko Obayahsi’s Hausu with the
abstracted narrative style of the aforementioned W.R., Valerie and Her Week of
Wonders is truly a lovely looking and sounding head trip. The soundtrack alone influenced the eventual
creation of the psych-folk band The
Valerie Project which provided an accompanying alternative soundtrack to
the film. Not everyone, particular
staunch Criterion collectors, will immediately embrace this peculiar and
perhaps even meandering exercise in pure cinema. It’s also worth noting the reduction of the
titular Valerie’s age from 17 in the novel to 13 in the film can’t help but
raise a few eyebrows when she finds herself either naked or cornered by
salacious vampires. Contrary to the
novel which seemed to follow a linear thread, director Jaromil Jires
intentionally leaves key passages of the dark fantasy out to exude even further
confusion than before. It also is
surprisingly short running at a brisk 76 minutes. Not to worry though, as Criterion has
provided plentiful extras rounding out the package with three early shorts by
Jaromil Jires, interviews with Czech film scholar Peter Hames as well as actors
Jaroslava Scallerova and Jan Klusak and best of all, an alternate soundtrack by
The Valerie Project!
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| "Nope. I just look like Mike Meyers." |
The elusive narrative, provocative presentation of
nubile young women and bouts of offhand wackiness will no doubt divide
cinephiles. As a fan of both Dusan
Makavejev and Vera Chytilova, Valerie and
Her Week of Wonders doesn’t disappoint in terms of its rebellious protest
against what was termed by the Soviet Union as ‘films for a socialist
person’. As expected, Valerie wasn’t taken lightly by those
who first saw it, as when the Soviet Union tried to bury it by withholding it
from exhibition at the Sydney Film Festival.
Oddly, despite the censorial move by the Soviets, director Jaromil Jires
continued making films well into the 1990's.
As Valerie stands today, it is
undeniably an interesting, idiosyncratic curiosity. Whether you grasp the phantasmagoria at hand
might be beside the point. At a time
when film was being overseen by communist powers intent on allowing films to be
made only as they saw fit, the Czech New Wave saw to combat such a repressive
creative and political climate by assailing cinemas with broken narratives,
sexual provocation and above all, a deliberate breakdown of the ways movies are
meant to be made. As a product of anarchic
Russian and Czech sensibilities, Valerie
and Her Week of Wonders is the lightest and probably the loveliest looking
and sounding of the bunch!
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-Andrew Kotwicki