CZECH IT OUT: FROM SURREAL VAMPIRES TO TOM AND JERRY
From a nubile teenager’s erotic high jinks to an animated game of cat and mouse, Prague’s finest produced the goods
Avisual rondo of free-floating symbols, shape-shifting vampires and erotic high jinks, set in the fertile imagination of a newly nubile teenager, Jaromil Jires’ phantasmagoric Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) may be the most exotic flower to bloom on the grave of the Prague Spring, but it’s one with deep roots in 20th-century Czech culture.
The movie (out from Criterion on Bluray and DVD) is based on a Gothic novel by Vitizslav Nezval, written in the mid-1930s when he was de facto leader of Prague’s surrealist circle, but unpublished until after World War II once he became a functionary in the Ministry of Information and then, with the 1948 Communist coup, the Stalinist regime’s unofficial poet laureate.
Jires’ first feature, The Cry (1964), has been called the earliest expression of the Czech new wave; more formally radical than politically daring, it stalled his career for several years. He was in the middle of shooting his second, an adaptation of Milan Kundera’s acutely political novel The Joke, when Czechoslovakia was invaded by its Warsaw Pact allies in August 1968.
Unlike his colleagues Milos Forman and Ivan Passer (as well as Kundera), Jires stuck around, completing The Joke in 1969. According to the novelist Josef Skvorecky’s personal history of Czech cinema, The Joke was praised by Czech apparatchiks for criticising the Kundera novel — something Jires angrily denied — and then banned for two decades.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, Jires’ next project, based on a wildly provocative piece of writing by an author, Nezval, whose postwar career made him politically sacrosanct, poked a finger in the eye of Czechoslovakia’s enforced “normalisation”.
Most of Nezval’s novel — a hothouse hybrid of surrealist favourites, including Lewis Carroll, the Marquis de Sade and Matthew Lewis, author of the 18th-century shocker The Monk: A Romance — is dreamed by Valerie in the aftermath of her first menstruation. Jires’ movie, shot mainly in the preserved Renaissance town of Slavonice, is a bit lighter; it’s nothing but a dream from beginning to end, and, thanks to the innocently sensuous Valerie (13-year-old Jaroslava Schallerova) and her magic earrings, it’s a fetish object as well.
Compared with that of the feisty protagonist of Alice in Wonderland, Valerie’s personality is negligible. Twirling by herself in a gauzy music-box world, drifting in and out of the family crypt, she is one recurring element in a world of flaming torches and lace curtains, white-on-white interiors and sweet choral harmonies, priests in mime make-up and ardent bloodsuckers.
Bells tinkle, bees buzz and cobwebs are indistinguishable from veils. The movie — it won first prize at the Bergamo Film Festival in Italy, surely to the displeasure of Czech authorities — is so besotted with signs and omens it might be a Slavic El Topo.
Her sexual curiosity notwithstanding, Valerie exists mainly as a foil to the adult monsters, more comic than scary, who threaten her. In one dramatic scene, she is accused of witchcraft and sent to the stake, mocking her persecutors all the while. In another, she revives a bishop who might be her father, by planting a chaste — if bloody — kiss on his lips and inadvertently turning him into a monstrous would-be rapist.
Consistently and humorously anti-clerical, Valerie is a movie in which the old seek to prey upon the young. Valerie’s whey-faced grandmother (Helena Anyzova) hopes to sacrifice the girl to regain her own youth, dies and returns several times, in the last instance as Valerie’s mother. Soon after, everyone is reconciled in a verdant meadow with Valerie wandering among the amorous couples who ultimately form a circle around her bed.
“The film is a weird exercise, striking out boldly in the paths of Bergman, Fellini and Buñuel,” Howard Thompson wrote in The New York Times when Valerie opened, on a bill with Soviet director Serge Paradjanov’s even more extravagantly trippy Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors at the Elgin Theater, then New York’s go-to venue for hippie, cult and midnight movies.
Jires’ subsequent career was long, unremarkable and largely home-based. Valerie, however, lived on outside Czechoslovakia as a “head” film, an inspiration for the British writer of adult fairy tales Angela Carter and a favourite of various psychedelic bands including a Philadelphia group called the Valerie Project, whose original soundtrack (performed live in 2007 at the Museum of Modern Art) is included among the extras.