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Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
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There
is an entire modern culture – in art, literature, music, and cinema – springing
from the legacy of Lewis Carroll’s books Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through
the Looking-Glass (1871).
I
refer not to the reassuring children’s story retold so as to provide the young
with moral lessons and a comfortable rite of passage into socially sanctioned
adulthood. Rather, I mean the hallucinatory dreamscape of constant
metamorphosis that allows a subversive, leading role for blossoming female
sexuality and the attractive dangers of existence’s dark side.
Valerie and Her Week
of Wonders is the Alice myth turned inside out and set ablaze. This trippy succession of
dream images – set to a non-stop soundtrack of experimental-medieval-folk-rock
by Lubos Fiser that sounds entirely au
courant today – throws everything into the war of eroticism versus
repression.
There
are nuns, dark towers, a black-caped figure of Death, lovers cavorting in
fields, monstrous couplings, magic objects, perverse alliances … and all
dressed and designed in that baroque, Eastern European style we recognise from
the films of Walerian Borowczyk and many other directors of the 1960s and ‘70s. Jireš was a strong, important part of the brief
flowering of the ‘60s Czech New Wave.
At
the centre of this film is a young girl, Valerie, played by Jaroslava
Schallerová, who was only 13 at the time of filming. (It would be hard to get
away with this in the film industry of today, almost anywhere.) The story
effectively begins by matter-of-factly narrating the detail of her first
menstrual period – but, although there is plenty of familiar, vampiric, horror-genre
imagery in the film, this is no Carrie (1976).
Rather, Valerie is floridly lyrical,
enraptured by the flow of water, the burst of sunlight, and the ripeness of
flesh. It is, paradoxically, a portrait of budding sexuality that retains an
innocent air.
What
happened to Carroll’s Alice in cultural history is quite clear: she was gleefully
abducted by the artists and thinkers of surrealism, in all its diverse forms
and manifestation throughout the 20th century and beyond. Inspired
by the Freudian dream-work and Marxist social theory alike, surrealism took
Carroll’s tale as a template of wonder and revolt.
This
cultural figure of the little girl, in her many changing incarnations, is less
a three-dimensional, psychological character than a mythic figure – projecting
herself wildly into everything she sees and experiences around her, imagining
her destiny fleetingly materialised as this fair maiden or that old crone, this
voluptuous seductress or that stern school teacher …
Valerie remains astonishing
for the way it packs this dreamlike parade of projections
and transformations into a mere 73 minutes; it is a small epic of surrealist
cinema. Working from a novel by the celebrated Czech writer Vitězslav Nezval (1900-1958), Jireš provides, in film history, the missing link
between the unimpeachably surrealist career of Luis Buńuel, and the politicised
fantastications of UK novelist Angela Carter, whose script for Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves (1984) owes much
to Valerie.
Although
there were plenty of commentators in the 1960s art world ready to pronounce
surrealism a long-dead movement, the cinema rallied its dearest and darkest
powers, at that time, to assert otherwise: the films of Buñuel, Nelly Kaplan (The Pirate’s Fiancée aka A Very Curious Girl, 1969) and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders are
proof of that enduring vitality.
© Adrian Martin January 2015 |