Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)

This is quite simply one of the most beautiful films ever made. You may not like it now, but if you see it again later, you will, I promise you. But you might love it now. It makes such wonderful use of image and color, not to mention music. Wow, what an immersive experience! You’ve just got to see it. But, you have to be in the right frame of mind to see it; otherwise you’ll hate it.

There’s no real plot; it’s more of a Freudian dreamscape presented as a fairy tale. And as to that, wow, this movie gets that fairy tale quality effortlessly, while so many other movies spend millions to get it and fail every time. You just won’t ever see a movie that feels like a fairy tale more than this one does.

Essentially, stripped down to its core, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is an allegory about a tween girl starting her period, and as such, “becoming a woman”. And so, because she’s no longer a child, she has to navigate this new world of sex and society she was previously oblivious to. At least, that’s the gist of it.

Now, you might expect a movie about such a topic to be lame, and you’d be right, unless it’s this one. No, really: Valerie’s Week of Wonders, such as it is, consists of her new menstrual blood attracting vampires, which try to make a deal for eternal youth with her grandmother, who is only too glad to stab her granddaughter in the back. So she learns about sex, death, aging, lost love, desperation, etc., and there’s more still. She’s also attacked by a lecherous priest, who because she has a magic pearl, fails, so he hangs himself; but with the same pearl she revives him, and his thanks to her is to accuse her of trying to seduce him publicly, and she gets burned at the stake. (Wow, I’ll bet that’s how a lot of actual “witch” burnings happened. In a world when religion held absolute power, they could get away with anything, and anyone who said no to their sexual advances could be killed at a whim to prevent them from revealing the truth, as well as intimidating others who might say no in the future.)

So, to recap, Valerie gets attacked by vampires, she’s seduced by a horny priest, she’s sold for eternal youth by her own flesh and blood, she gets buried alive (Oh, sorry did I forget to mention that? Just watch and see!), she gets burned at the stake, and then she’s accepted into society at the end. (Spoiler alert!)

Wow, you know what that sounds like to me? A hazing ritual. You know, like at a sorority, or like Hell Week at Bryn Mawr College. But they always end the same way (unless they end up on the news with a death and some chapter being dissolved), don’t they? Yes, the young acolyte is accepted into the community after facing a bunch of horrors. And what I like most about this movie is that even after she’s accepted, we still see vampires and lecherous priests and such, as if to say that this is a part of life in the real adult world that you can’t escape from no matter how much you might like to (and it is, believe me).

TCM recently showed this movie in a double bill with its perfect counterpart: Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (1965). I’d never thought of it before, but Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is about a young girl entering puberty, and as such, a world of sexuality; and Juliet of the Spirits is about a woman who is entering menopause whose husband is cheating on her, and she has the choice of sexual activity or an acceptance of a post-sexual life, and she chooses the latter. So the two movies essentially cover the beginning and the end of the same subject, albeit with different protagonists. But both movies are undoubtedly among the most beautiful movies ever made in color, as well as being two of the surrealist masterpieces ever committed to celluloid. Once you see them together, you will feel an instant connection between the films. They’re just that great of a match. You might even wonder, if you’ve seen them together for the first time, how they weren’t meant for this pairing ultimately. (Kudos to the TCM programmers on this one!)