Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders Site

Yet unlike the explicitly dissident films of the era, Valerie resists despair. It ends not with death, but with a wedding—an absurd, joyful, incestuous carnival where Valerie, wearing a white dress stained with symbolic blood, marries Orlík while the Constable and Grandmother dance. It is an ending that says: We have survived the week of wonders. We have seen the monsters. Now, we will live anyway. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a difficult film to categorize. It is too strange for horror, too violent for a fairy tale, too erotic for a children’s film, and too innocent for pornography. It exists in the same uncanny valley as Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon , Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror , and the later works of David Lynch.

The film’s genius is its refusal to clarify. Is Valerie dreaming? Has she been drugged? Is she experiencing the hormonal chaos of first puberty as a literal apocalypse? The answer is yes to all. The camera lingers on Schallerová’s face—a face of astonishing stillness. She rarely screams. She observes the monstrosity around her with a curious, beatific calm, as if the world of incestuous priests, lesbian grandmothers, and stabbings is merely a difficult exam she must pass to enter the next grade of life. Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders

Its influence is felt in the dream-logic of Twin Peaks , the ethereal horror of Let the Right One In , and the fashion photography of Tim Walker. But more than its artistry, the film endures because of Valerie herself. In a cinematic landscape where teenage girls are usually slasher-fodder or manic-pixie muses, she remains a singular creation: a priestess of puberty, walking barefoot through a nightmare, holding a candle against the dark. Yet unlike the explicitly dissident films of the