Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)
Directed by Jaromil Jireš
Valerie, a Czechoslovakian teenager living with her grandmother, is blossoming into womanhood, but that transformation proves secondary to the effects she experiences when she puts on a pair of magic earrings. Now seeing the world around her in a different light, Valerie must endure her sexual awakening while attempting to discern reality from fantasy as she encounters lecherous priest Gracian, a vampire-like stranger and otherworldly carnival folk.
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What critics compared Valerie and Her Week of Wonders to
A sister to the heroines of "Thirteen" and other Hardwicke films, Valerie -- her name likely borrowed from the magical 1970 Czech horor-fantasy, "Valerie and Her Week of Wonders" -- is threatened not just by wolves of varying degrees of hairiness but by a heritage of abuse and dysfunction that, as manifested in the real world, is no fairy tale.
It parallels Jaromil Jireš's Valerie and her Week of Wonders in its tale of budding sex and the surreal phantasmagoria that explodes in the imagination around such a thing.
Shot in the lyrical Elvira Madigan mode, this celebrates the 'first stirrings of adolescence' of a beautiful young girl in a vaguely-defined Transylvanian townscape sometime in the last century.