البـــــوابـــة
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
is a poignant, surreal Freudian fantasy in which a young girl's
transformation from child to adult through the onset of puberty is
expressed as a nightmarish fantasia, a dreamlike fairy tale populated
with vampires, uncertain parentage, transformations from one state to
another, grisly violence and lurid sexuality. Valerie (Jaroslava
Schallerová) lives with her forbidding grandmother (Helena Anýzová),
retaining her child's sense of curiosity and good humor despite the
austere circumstances of her upbringing and the religious seriousness of
her pale, corpse-like grandmother. Director Jaromil Jireš depicts
Valerie's grandmother in thick, pasty makeup that gives her a wan
appearance, as though she was already a ghost with no corporeal
presence. There is an opposition here between those who embrace the
sensuality of the world, like the curious, open-minded Valerie, and
those who deny it and castigate themselves for supposed sins of the
flesh.
Valerie is very much out of place within this atmosphere
of Christian guilt. She spies on young women bathing in a lake, watching
as the women's white clothes are soaked through, and they kiss and play
strange sexual games; one woman puts a slithering, writhing fish down
her shirt, letting it slide around between her breasts. As Valerie walks
home after seeing this outrageous erotic fantasy, a few drops of blood
fall on a white flower, signaling the girl's first period and thus her
transition from girl to woman, setting her off on a journey she only
half understands. Her grandmother takes the news disapprovingly, but is
even more dismayed when Valerie points out a sinister stranger who her
grandmother seems to know: a man (Jirí Prýmek) dressed in a black cloak
with a pale white face and horrible crooked, pointed teeth. He hides
behind a weasel mask and keeps with him a servant named Eagle (Petr
Kopriva), who generally obeys his orders but revolts when it comes to
Valerie, with whom he forms a nearly instant camaraderie. This sinister
man is a monster, sometimes called Weasel, or Richard, or the constable,
or the bishop; he is apparently many different men, possibly Valerie's
father, a former lover to Valerie's grandmother and/or her absent
mother. He is the devil, or a demon, or the vampire of Murnau's Nosferatu
(with whom he shares an especially close resemblance with his bald
white dome and pointed ears), or a metaphysical incarnation of the
missing man who begat Valerie and then vanished from her life. Whoever
he is, his attempts to gain control over innocent young Valerie, who
possibly holds the key to his eternal life, send the young girl on a
strange adventure through multiple planes of reality.
Jireš depicts Valerie's adventures with a
casual surrealism that is constantly disrupting the flow of reality.
Characters die and are reincarnated without explanation, while others
transmute into multiple forms and multiple personalities, seemingly
warped by the strange power of Weasel or Valerie's imagination. As
Valerie hovers on the cusp of womanhood, she is beset with multiple
possibilities, multiple incarnations of her oncoming sexual awakening.
As befits this unstable, uncertain transitional phase, her exposure to
sexuality is sometimes fascinating, sometimes horrifying, sometimes
merely puzzling. She is pursued by the priest Gracián (Jan Klusák),
another religious hypocrite who promises her he'll tell her all about
her father and mother but instead merely tries to seduce her, dancing
towards her baring his grotesque teeth and pulling his robe down from
around his neck to reveal the necklace of bones at his throat.
The
veneer of normality is very thin here, and the priest might become an
animalistic rapist at a moment's notice, just as the "missionary" in the
pulpit, lecturing about the sanctity of virginity and the way innocence
is spoiled by sex, might be Weasel barely in disguise, his white face
painted dark blue beneath his robes. There is something disconcerting,
though, about the way Jireš' camera sometimes seems to be ogling Valerie
and the real teen actress who plays her, who spends much of the film in
various states of undress or carefully arranged disarray. There are
times when Jireš seems unwittingly complicit in the sexually voracious
leers of those who pursue Valerie.
Despite this unsettling
feeling, the film is a sensual phantasmagoria, exploring the strange
netherworld opened up at the junction point between childhood and
adulthood. Jire&353; marries his dazzling imagery to a continually
shifting score (written by Lubos Fiser and Jan Klusák) that encompasses
tinkling music box circularity, jaunty folk melodies, and haunting
religious choral hymns. This mix of disparate musical moods and sources
mirrors the film's uneasy blend of fantasy with a child's eye view on
reality. The film's unsettling surrealism is perhaps a perfect visual
expression of a preteen's insecurity and uncertainty: she is beginning
to understand certain things, to be disabused of her innocence, but she
her perspective is still slightly askew, without an adult's certainty
about how the world works and what her experiences might mean. Valerie
is starting to be exposed to the adult world, and what she sees looks
grotesque and perhaps even evil: thus one interpretation of the film is
as a wholly subjective perspective on Valerie's dawning realizations
about her family's complicated sexual history and the hypocrisy and
distasteful behavior underlying the seemingly respectable Christian folk
around her.
Valerie, however, is ultimately triumphant
because she manages to maintain her honor and her innocence even as she
transitions towards adulthood. She is not corrupted by the adult things
she is learning about, but instead confronts them directly. She resists
the priest's advances and struggles to understand the nature of her
developing relationship with Eagle: are they brother and sister or
prospective lovers? This relationship especially could indicate a new
perspective forming, a transitional state between the innocence of
childhood, when everyone, boy or girl, is merely a friend, a platonic
sibling, and the new sexual awareness of maturity, when relationships
between boys and girls are fraught with sexual tensions and the
possibilities of less platonic affections. Valerie is still polysexual,
unattached to any particular conception of herself or her sexuality. At
one point, she goes to bed with the young bride Hedvika (Alena
Stojáková), and Valerie's innocent affection ("I've never had a
girlfriend before," she exclaims excitedly), her kisses and embraces,
cure the other woman of the vampiric affliction she'd been suffering,
which had been slowly draining the life from her. Valerie, in her
innocence, is a powerful figure; hers is a spiritual innocence, like
that of Joan of Arc, to whom she's implicitly compared in the scene when
Gracián, in a fervor of religious hypocrisy, sentences her to be burned
at the stake for supposedly trying to seduce him.
With its
striking surrealist imagery, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is
a haunting, magical film, a film alive with a sense of forbidden
sexuality and transformation. It's a deeply strange film, constantly
subverting narrative clarity and demanding that its images be taken as
metaphors rather than at face value. Valerie's grandmother makes a deal
with the Weasel for eternal youth, and returns as a sexy vampire who
sucks the life out of the men she beds, but by the film's end she's been
restored to her former dour, pale-faced self; perhaps her vampiric
incarnation was only an expression of her domineering influence on
Valerie's life. The ending is similarly ambiguous, as Valerie wanders
with a mischievous smile through a riverside bacchanalia, summoned with a
wave of the hand from various revelers to join in their orgiastic
sexuality, but she simply strolls through their midst, no longer
threatened by the man in the black robes, or her grandmother, or even by
the frightening and longed-for specter of her missing mother. Instead,
she simply finds her way to a white, frilly bed in the center of a
clearing and goes to sleep, initially surrounded on all sides by a
circle of partiers but then framed in isolation within the spacious
clearing for the film's final image. This image suggests that Valerie
has maintained her innocence and purity of spirit against the
temptations and horrors of the world, and gone back to sleep with the
ease of a child in her cradle.
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