Shifting Perspectives on Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)

The first time I watched Jaromil Jireš' masterpiece, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, I was 19, having just finished my first year of undergrad. I was only three years older than lead actress Jaroslava Schallerová was when she appeared in the film. I found it to be a surrealist, fantastique, erotic masterpiece, and it left an indelible impression on me despite not fully understanding all the narrative threads. I also fell in love with Valerie, her beauty and her fleeting innocence on the cusp of full womanhood. But even then there were inklings in me that something was off, despite not having discovered radical feminism; even an elderly cinephile I was in contact with, who was pro-porn, found the film unwatchable as a father of daughters. I didn't watch the film again until August of 2021, when I went through a phase exploring Slavic horror and fantasy films. Being older, the sexualization of Valerie was much more blatantly uncomfortable that time around, but it also came off as being less erotic and more tasteful than I remember it being. In that viewing I assessed it more on the grounds of a genre picture, and it's use of horror and fantasy motifs. I still found the overall narrative perplexing, but less so than when I first saw it. A few weeks ago, I read the source novel of the same name by Czech surrealist Vítězslav Nezval. The novel is much more straightforward than the film, and reads like a mashup of surrealist and pulp tropes. The surrealism is limited more to the fantastical events, as opposed to the shifting planes of existence seen in the movie. It's important to note that in the movie, Valerie is depicted as a 13 year old, while in the novel she's 17. I watched the film again yesterday with a friend, to introduce him to Czech fantasy and horror, and also to see how the film would work for me after having read the novel. It's still a masterpiece of the fantastique, and still on the list of my 100 favorite films, but the problematic aspects of the film definitely appear more glaring than they ever did. Valerie is depicted in the film as a nubile innocent, just having had her menarche, and while tasteful, she is treated as an erotic object, and shown nude in a few scenes. The camera doesn't linger on her young beauty, but it does emphasize it. As a man now pushing 30, it's more uncomfortable than ever to see this on display. According to a video on the YouTube Channel In Praise of Shadows, screenwriter Ester Krumbachová, a well-known Czech feminist and fantasy writer, who scripted other Czech New Wave classics such as Daisies (1968) and Wtichhammer (1970), was originally supposed to direct the film, but Jireš was chosen instead. One has to wonder what kind of product the film would have been had Krumbachová directed it from an explicitly female perspective, and not one filtered through the lens of a man. Perhaps it would have been a more authentic work of art.