DARKNESS and DESIRE
An unsettling vampire fantasia screens on Monday at the Paradise. Adam Nayman discusses why it’s worth sinking your teeth into
“Valerie and Her Week of Wonders” concerns a girl with a pearl earring: the jewelry, we learn, is imbued with magical powers handed down by Valerie’s grandmother, who would just as soon steal the trinkets back (and with them, her own youth) than let their teenage owner become the beneficiary of such a powerful inheritance. The push and pull between tradition and modernity — and, more specifically, between old-fashioned sexual repression and more contemporary forces of liberation — are at the heart of Jaromil Jires’ uniquely unsettling fantasia, which has been canonized by the Criterion Collection and screens in Toronto on Monday as part of the Paradise Cinema’s new series Puberty Blues, which focuses on different cinematic visions of female coming-ofage (other titles include “The Virgin Suicides”).
The film, which is considered a cornerstone of the Czech New Wave, was originally based on a 1930s Surrealist fable but shot in 1968 in the run-up to the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. Jires’ previous feature, “The Joke,” had been banned by Communist authorities. Viewed in this context of censorship and ambient, everyday violence, its subversive imagery and ideology becomes all the more daring. The theme of invasion is established early on, with the news that itinerant troupes of missionaries and actors are set to descend on an idyllic village whose inhabitants — including 13-year old Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová) — seem to exist out of time; the fairy-tale like atmosphere is heightened by the character’s introduction as a literal sleeping beauty, glimpsed dozing demurely in a state of innocence. To the extent that the film has a plot, it hinges on its namesake’s awakening to the complexities of the adult world, which are represented in a series of dreamlike episodes conflating religious and demonic symbols. In one indelible shot, we see a statue of Adam and Eve swarmed by bees (an image worthy of Luis Buñuel). Everywhere the camera looks, objects and structures seem either haunted or enchanted around the edges, and the same goes for the people, who contain multitudes. The tendency of the men in Valerie’s life to transform into pale, bloodsucking vampires in moments of compulsive, involuntary desire suggests a darkly funny vision of humanity’s more monstrous tendencies.
With its vivid — and unmistakable — whispers of incest and pedophilia, “Valerie and Her Week of Wonders” doesn’t so much skirt political correctness, as bypass it entirely, but it’s hardly a work of exploitation or prurience. Instead, its carefully controlled, phantasmagorical style uses ancient, powerful tropes of carnival to critique religious piety itself (the climax anticipates the ending of Ari Aster’s “Midsommar”). What’s being skewered is the hypocrisy of an older cohort that cloaks its stubborn lust for life in judgmental contempt for youth and their rituals — a dynamic with a striking contemporary resonance. For millennial audiences weaned on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Twilight,” Jires’ masterpiece may seem somehow remote but also deeply familiar. For all of its bizarre touches, it’s a movie with a direct line to the adolescent subconscious, and could easily end up being a younger cinephile’s new favourite movie — one to revisit and later hand down like a treasured heirloom.