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
Schallerovà) 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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