‘This is only a dream. I’m asleep… and all this is a dream.’

13 year old Valerie (the stunning Jaroslava Schallerová, in an astonishing film debut) navigates a disorientating world of the fantastique and the horrific set in an old European village. With what there is of a narrative seeming to tangentially center on her stolen earrings, the girl fends off depraved demon priests openly desiring to possess her in the night (well, all the town’s girls, for that matter – and there seems to be a lot of them to choose from), with one of the more openly slithering of the lot she rejects vengefully demanding she be burned at the stake for ‘creating desire in him’, blood-sucking vampirism that runs rampant through her lineage and family members who inexplicably keep changing identity.

From the flowery cursive purple opening credits over a white screen (repeated at the end) and its flute theme, “Valerie” announces itself as firmly within a fairy-tale world. An yet, with images of stern-faced men marching shirtless through the town strapping themselves for some penance or another, to the vampiric priest delivering a benediction of open desire for the rows of nubile girls before him (as he casually sips at the red wine), to the endless lush and often grotesque presentations (the Criterion transfer is absolutely stunning), it’s a glorious smorgasbord of religiously significant, sexually perverse horrific images with a sensual, taboo-minded perspective that no major studio in their right mind would touch with one of those flaming torches the men in the film keep carrying around like representations of their burning penises.

The striking 13 year old Schallerová (same age as her character) is presented in such a rare, unsettlingly (well, from my American perspective, anyway) sexual way (which includes some openly sensual under-age nudity), I couldn’t help but be reminded of 14 year old Linda Blair in William Friedkin’s brilliant and audacious (if far more narratively mainstream, as well as underlyingly conservative) The Exorcist, simulating masturbation with a crucifix as she shrieks “Let Jesus fuck you!” and wonder if being asked to do such taboo-breaking things at such an impressionable age didn’t… well… screw her up a bit, as it did with Blair (to be fair, mainly because of opportunistic producers taking advantage of a female actor they saw they could abusively take advantage of). I have no idea of the young girl’s thespian path post-“Week of Wonders” but can say, with the waif-like innocence of her physicality, merged with the undeniable allure of her youth and burgeoning sexuality, she was breathtakingly perfect in the role.

With Valerie forced by the demonic priest to bare witness to her grandmother (who looks way to young to be anything but her mother) sexuality humiliating herself before a barely interested religious man and her sexual dalliances with her own brother (who only loses the ghoul makeup when his identity shifts to being an actor with no familial connection to her – no surprise, he comes alive the moment he becomes an allowable object of her desire, rather than an incestual one), Valerie is a coming-of-age story in a Freudian landscape, a literalization of a child’s subconscious perspective of the world.

It’s (pre-sexual) fairy tale, merging with sudden wildly exciting sexuality… and the accompanying, far more terrifying and monstrous recognition of Freud’s underlying polymorphous perversity (in which we’d all be fucking everything – man, woman, child, brother, mother, whatever – if those pesky societal constrictions didn’t come along, creating road-blocks like taboos, to normalize our sexual behaviours) in which the only way Valerie can contend with (in true Freudian terms, and in proper dream-like fashion) constantly shifting and displacing identities, and creating fictionalized vampires and demons, to make them more palatable (because, when our subconscious speaks in dreams, it’s nice enough to understand that too much truth is a bit hard for our consciousness to take… it’s why we moved it to down there in the first place!).

Valerie and her Week of Wonders (with the duration in the title clearly referencing the often expanded, yet finite time frame, sense of a dream) is a brilliant euro-trash evocation of the coming of age of a 13 year old girl, in which she’s neither truly innocent, becoming aware of the power of her desirability, nor nowhere near a conniving vixen, as she can’t possibly grasp the destructive nature that those who feverishly desire her are capable of. And, while recognizing sexuality, at the same time, unable to understand the torturous machinations of it upon the adults around her, who seem twisted by it (into untrustworthy monsters, seemingly completely in control – from the innocent’s perspective – of this destructive desire).

Valerie is jam-packed with astoundingly lush, sensual and hypnotizing imagery (and I mean just about every shot, with many of them from above, looking down at evocatively choreographed scenes that our Valerie either walks, or is forced, through). Even my (also 13 year old) daughter, normally driven to complete annoyance at watching something she isn’t quite understanding, hung to the end with me, unable to turn away from the striking visual statements she was seeing, even if she couldn’t figure out why no one was recognizing that the priest was outwardly a demon, or why the way-too-young-yet-dead-looking-grandma suddenly returned as a vampiric cousin (because perhaps she was connecting on a deeper level she wasn’t even understanding?)…

Blood drops staining the petals of a pure white flower that Valerie holds (can it be any more obvious?). Valerie burning at the stake, denounced as having tried to seduce the very priest who tried taking her in the night. Valerie voyeuristically watching a vampiric orgy that ends with a young female victim devoured in the bedroom by sexual male and female monsters. The jarring strings interrupting the fairy tale-like themes. It’s a fairy tale fantasy intruded upon again and again by the underlying horror of uncontrolled desire.

Mirroring the opening post-credit shot of Valeria awakening (get it?), the ending finds Valerie sleeping peacefully, in her plush bed, but now alone in a vast swath of the quiet woods. What she has gone through is certainly part of reality, but of an underlying one; one literalized in dreams and nightmares. Like all of it throughout, it’s an unforgettable image.

Like so much great cinema daring to be avant-garde, surreal and/or experimental, Valerie and her Week of Wonders might not reach the consciousness of the masses who congregate in the local Cineplex for their distractions, it remains a deeply admirable artistic achievement and likely has more powerfully realized (and challenging) observations (and less propaganda) in any chosen thirty seconds of screen time than found in the full entire twenty film (or however many) combined screen time of the pro-military, status quo conforming superhero sagas that work so hard to infantilize an entire society.

Buck A Review