The weird and occasionally wonderful 1970 movie ‘Valerie & Her Week of Wonders’ is based on a 1935 novella by Czech author Vítězslav Nezval and directed by Jaromil Jireš.
It’s a movie which, alongside cult classics like ‘The Wicker Man’ and ‘Holy Mountain’, is held in high esteem within some quarters of the New Folk movement. Like those movies, it centres mainly on big issues like sex, death, religion and the corruption of innocence; themes which also loom large in the contaminated folk music of the New Weird America.
Greg Weeks of Philadelphia’s ‘Espers’ is a huge fan of the movie and he describes it as “a staggeringly beautiful celluloid fantasy which mirrored the aesthetic and radical consciousness of the 60s counterculture that birthed it”.
Weeks went so far as to assemble his cohorts and other players to create an updated soundtrack for the movie, released on Drag City as ‘The Valerie Project’. This features a large smattering pretty pretty pastoral together with ethereal (wordless) singing and a few psychedelic blasts of electric noise to remind us of its contemporary status. It makes for an interesting mix that undoubtedly works best while watching the movie rather than as a stand alone piece.
The movie itself has more symbolism than the plot can comfortably cope with. Some of this is poignant and effective although much of it looks dated and a bit silly.
What it succeeds in doing is entering the dream/nightmare world of a beautiful 13 year old girl who has just reached puberty. We learn of her condition from drops of blood which fall on daisies as she walks in the garden – not the subtlest of imagery but it gets the message over clearly enough.
Valerie is warned by a priest that she must beware of rough hands leaving an “indelible fingerprint” although with heavy irony it is the reverends, bishops and missionaries themselves who pose the greatest threat to her virginity. Most of these take on the form of vampires with serious dental issues.
If only for its novelty value, it’s well worth seeing.
