Valerie and her Week of Won­ders, set in the early nine­teenth cen­tury, was based on a novel by Vítězslav Nez­val and released in 1970. It is a poignant night­mar­ish fan­ta­sia, a dream­like fairy tale pop­u­lated with vam­pires, uncer­tain parent­age, trans­for­ma­tions from one state to another, grisly vio­lence and lurid sex­u­al­ity in a Gothic style con­cern­ing the onset of men­stru­a­tion and the sex­ual awak­en­ing of a thir­teen year old girl.

Dur­ing the dark days behind the iron cur­tain, Czech direc­tor Jaromil Jireš, main fig­ure of the Czechoslo­vak New Wave, turned to fairy­tale sur­re­al­ism and Freudian sym­bol­ism for a study of bur­geon­ing youth. The child­like but chill­ing tale is accen­tu­ated by the eerie cham­ber music of Luboš Fišer.

Fišer’s score car­ries a pas­toral­ism which gives weight to the folky dream­scape in which Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová) freely inter­acts with the char­ac­ters of her dreams. The con­tin­u­ally shift­ing sounds 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.

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.