VALERIE A TYDEN DIVU is magic. Like so few other films, VALERIE crystallizes a sense of the mystical, the ethereal, and captures it to celluloid. The film is a gem that retains a sense of delicate purity while the world around it loses its magic and becomes uglier and greyer with each passing day. In VALERIE, director Jaromil Jires (THE JOKE) has done something that few film makers with the exception of Ingmar Bergman, fellow Czech Juraj Herz, Russian masters such as Aleksandr Ptushko and Alexander Row, Jean Cocteau, Federico Fellini, Alejandro Jodorowsky and sometimes Jean Rollin have been capable of achieving: The creation a fantasy world populated by figures born of our collective subconscious and shared in the world's folklore and fairy tales. The story concerns a young girl (played by then fourteen-year-old Jaroslava SchallerovāŠ on the cusp of womanhood. From the first tentative awakenings of her sexuality (a drop of blood upon a flower) to the final acceptance of her transformation by all of her community (an ending that appears to be lifted, in part, in the 2003 Tim Burton film BIG FISH), we move through a world haunted by vampires, witches, weasels and, worst of all, licentious clergy members. In Valerie's world the baroque beauty and the decay of death forge a symbiotic relationship that nurtures the young girl and brings her from confusion and terror to the warm, fecund embrace of sensuality. VALERIE was made in 1970, just two years after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In this time of great turmoil, when the freedoms of the cinema were closing under the tyranny of communism, Jaromil Jires conjured one of the finest films to come out of the lysergic late-'60s/early-'70s period of cinematic experimentation. Some jaded viewers of today may dismiss the film's symbolism as heavy-handed and its hallucinogenic mise-en-scene as a relic of the psychedelic past, but they are perhaps too jaded by the cynicism, audience-friendly violence and slick commercialism of modern cinema. (Contrast VALERIE with hollow, soulless crap like LEGEND and see which movie has the magic and which movie has a poofy-haired Tom Cruise playing an air-headed elf.) VALERIE the movie is like Valerie the character: It is caught in time; frozen in the amber of the moment. To allow yourself into its world is to take part in budding beauty that will forever exist outside the ravages of time and the slow decay of aging. Here is purity for those who retain the desire to embrace it. (Side note: the supplemental Snubdom cartoon by artist Rick Trembles that appears on the disc is a review of Diabolik DVD co-owner Joseph A. Gervasi's 16mm print of VALERIE that screened at the Cinema du Parc, Montreal, in Spring, 2003.)
- NTSC Region 1
- English Subtitles
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