ThiefHott Too much of everything

Konterr Brilliant and touching

Tyreece Hulme One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Ella-May O'Brien Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

morrison-dylan-fan Years before seeing my first Czech movie I had heard of Valerie as a famous Horror title,which led to me picking up the DVD,but for some reason never getting round to watching it! Deciding to spend April watching one Czech film a day,I decided it was time experience a week of wonder.The plot:Waking up,Valerie finds that her earrings have been stolen.Searching around town for the thief,Valerie runs into a strange looking man with a mask.The next day Valerie discovers that the robber has returned her earrings.Due to the earrings belonging to her mum,Valerie (who is having her first period) decides to ask her grandmother Elsa about the earrings and her parents (who left her with Elsa years ago.)Learning some mysterious family history,and getting told that a group of actors are going to visit the town,Valerie gets ready for a week of wonder.View on the film:Complementing the movie with interesting extras,Second Run give the film a transfer whose audio and picture quality shines like crystals.Making her debut after beating 1,500 other actresses in the auditions, Jaroslava Schallerová gives a spellbinding performance as Valerie,with Schallerová wrapping Valerie in a delicate innocence which crumbles as she explores her womanhood.Showing a masterful touch well beyond her years, Schallerová expresses Valerie's sensuality in an expertly subtle manner,by making Valerie's naïve girlhood belief transform into something much more mature.Taking on multiple roles,the stylish Helena Anýzová gives incredibly distinctive performances as Babicka ,Elsa , Matka and Rusovláska!,each of whom are given unique qualities by Anýzová,which are carefully threaded round the entwining tale.Backed by a mythical score from Lubos Fiser,co-writer/(along with Ester Krumbachová and Jirí Musil) director Jaromil Jires & cinematographer Jan Curík spend the week soaking the screen in wondrous images.Covering pure white flowers in the blood of Valerie,Jires conjures Valerie's world with a hauntingly magical atmosphere,where the lavish,ultra-stylised vibrant colours of Valerie's childhood are overcast by rugged vampires, betraying weasels and decaying nightmares.Whilst not making an overtly political spell over their adaptation of Vítezslav Nezval,the screenplay by Jires/Krumbachová & Musil does rub an abrasive shoulder against the Soviet Union's idea of unity,due to Valerie battling to explore her most individualistic features.Weaving their fairy tale with transformations and sharp- toothed vampires,the writers weave Valerie's horrors with a fascinating psychological nightmare,thanks to the writers displaying an expert eye for each scene to be seen in two ways,from the eerie Gothic Horror shine being a canvas for a Freudian exploration in Valerie's loss of pure white flowers into being surrounded by the long,engulfing shadows of adulthood,as Valerie starts a new week of wonder.

pcsarkar A potent mix of straight sex, lesbianism, incest, pedophilia, vampirism, paganism, wiccan practices and other assorted deviancy. A lot of symbolism is used, so that reality merges with fantasy and the material world merges with the virtual. As the film progresses, it is never very clear as to who the villain is, and who is the virgin. However, one premise is obvious: almost everyone lusts after the female protagonist, and although she appears angelic, she is also no stranger to the wiles of men, including lustful priests, vampires and even her own father or brother. Watchable, at least once, for the waif-like beauty, Valerie, and her forays into a mystical, magical and surreal world, where corpses converse with the living, and brothers lust for their sisters.

matheusmarchetti Beautiful, disturbing, erotic, dreamlike... These are a few words that can sum up Jaromil Jires' deliriously bizarre fairy tale "Valerie and her Week of Wonders". Just like Richard Blackburn's sinister "Lemora, a Child's Tale of the Supernatural", "Valerie" is a 'coming of age' tale told through a monstrous metaphor: vampires, who prey on the young to drain their innocence. Despite similarities theme-wise, these two films are quite different, and "Valerie" is clearly superior - a film that will definitely haunt you for life, with images so shocking today as they were back in 70's when it was released. It is 'horror' of rare ethereal beauty and poetry, and definitely one of it's kind - perfectly capturing the fear, the curiosity and the pleasure of a little girl's sexual awakening. Jaroslava Schallerová is spellbinding as the title character - a combination of Lewis Caroll's Alice and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and manages to convey both the purity and the sensuality that the role requires. Kudos for her doing such 'depraved' scenes involving incest and lesbianism, that are surely unthinkable today. Helena Anýzová also gives a harrowing performance in the role of the grandmother, and her gradual transition from repressed Catholic old lady to a seductive, sex-crazed vampire is exquisite. Last but not least, Jires' excellent direction and Jan Curik's lush cinematography that highlights the film's "fever dream" tone help create this brilliant work of art that captures the essence of the ethereal and lyricism on celluloid unlike any other.

Eumenides_0 Jaromil Jires tells in Valerie and Her Week of Wonders a story about the coming of age and sexual awareness. Valerie is a thirteen-year-old girl whose life changes shortly after her first period. She inherits magical earing's from her dead mother, but a young man Orlik, who may or may not be her brother, steals them only to return them later. And he's working for a vampire, who may or may not be Valerie's father. What this mysterious creature wants from her is rather mysterious, but all the pieces are in place for a dark fantasy story about how the awareness of one's sexuality changes one.This movie is rather obsessed with sex, especially with the type that falls outside the normally accepted (and let's not forget this movie was made in 1970): lesbianism, incest, pedophilia, licentious priests, and couples having sex in front of nuns make part of the endless parade of lovely deviances in this movie. I'd love to know what critics thought about it back then.This movie has a lot of imagination and poetic images, and the vampire makeup may be the best since Nosferatu: imagine a tall, pale man with irregular teeth jutting from his mouth and long ears, wrapped in a black shroud (think of Bergman's Death), enveloping you in his arms. It's quite chilling.And yet it never captured my attention. The story wanders and meanders and never goes anywhere specific and slowly I became bored with it. The young actress, Jaroslava Schallerová, is pretty to look at, but her role is rather passive. She's an observer, she's a victim, especially of the local priest; but the story just breezes through her.However I wouldn't deter anyone from watching Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. This is a strange, mysterious movie. As an avant-garde fantasy/horror movie it's worth watching. Truth is, movies like these are seldom made and deserve more attention than they get.