Critics reviews

It’s 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.

Consistently and humorously anticlerical, "Valerie" is a movie in which the old seek to prey upon the young.

The movie's vampires and animal masks and masochistic rituals often feel like weirdness for its own sake, divorced from any context that would make them compelling as more than superficial cult fodder.

Over the last 45 years, it has peeled off from its historical moment and been embraced by foreign audiences, who have kept it in circulation because of how irresistibly it combines some very soft-core delights with the trappings of horror. One of the pleasures of watching Valerie now, in fact, is seeing it through this bifocal lens: as the lyrical product of filmmakers who dodged certain limits on their freedom of expression, and as a semi-obscure cult film appreciated more wryly in the West.

The result is a phantasmagoric display of visual ingenuity and aesthetic abstractions, a film which opens up new avenues of consideration and application of the medium's most fundamental tools by simply reimagining their latent potential. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders may be a willfully enigmatic, even obtuse viewing experience, but every frame continues to vibrant with energy and thrum with life—a life all the more unsettling for its familiarity.

Valerie remains astonishing for the way it packs this dreamlike parade of projections and transformations into a mere seventy-three 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 Buñuel, and the politicized fantastications of UK novelist Angela Carter.

I see that over in Britain they're having a theatrical screening of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, which the company has just recently released in a sparkling DVD edition, for Halloween. This strikes me as entirely apt. In its secular, commercialized form, Halloween is an entirely playful holiday, and Valerie, one of the most rapturous and peculiar artifacts of late-'60s/early-70s Czech cinema, is also one of the most buoyantly playful of all fantastic films.

In a visual and aural extravaganza that makes Ken Russell look like Ken Loach, the "light" and "dark" characters of the film join together in awakening Valerie from her long and terrifying sleep. Here, at long last, is that strange and wondrous "eccentric carnival" that the Czech Poetists of the 1920s felt was the aim of all true art.

The film's symbolism is alternately subtle and overt, and provides a gauzy tapestry of intoxicating and unsettling images that drives a rather cryptic narrative.

Virtually every shot is a knockout--for comparable use of color, you'd have to turn to some of Vera Chytilova's extravaganzas of the same period, such as Daisies and Fruit of Paradise. If you aren't too anxious about decoding what all this means, you're likely to be entranced.