Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

Based on a novel by Vítězslav Nezval (from 1945) and considered the last film of the Czechoslovak New Wave film, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is also part of other traditions: Czech surrealism, Gothic horror, and a type of Czech fairy tale known as pohádka. Combining sex and horror, Jireš was also following the trends of an era that liked stories of vampires entangled in erotic intrigue. Made during the bleak times of so-called normalization, the escapist, erotic “Arabela” tells us, in a series of dreamlike sequences, about the sexual maturation of a 13-year-old girl. Innocence and the temptation to lose it, lust and sin, pleasure and violence are perversely interwoven in Jireš’s film in a way that didn’t please the communist authorities, who preferred much safer folk tales. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders was not only limited in terms of distribution, but it wasn’t granted permission to be screened at the festival in Sydney. Instead of Jireš, Karel Zeman went there with his film On the Comet. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders was considered too artistic, too strange and too dark. Well, the Czechoslovak director apparently agreed with the politically incorrect opinion expressed in Kundera’s The Joke that, “Optimism is the opium of the people.”