I first (and last) watched this about 15 years ago, at which time I was so perplexed by it that I was tempted to just make the review of it on my old film blog “what the fuck” and noted that repeat viewings would evidently be necessary. I am only slightly less perplexed by it now, having finally undertaken that repeat visit 15 years later. If I try to sum it up, the best I can do is “a teenage girl has her first period, then there’s vampires, and other things happen”. I understand that it comes from surrealism, I know it’s from a novel by Vitezlav Nezval, who was one of the main movers of the Czech surrealist movement in the 1930s, and I get all of that. (On which note, the introduction on the old Second Run DVD I watched reckons it’s not actually a surrealist film as such, just one that employs surrealist techniques. If you insist.) I’m still left perplexed by what I’m supposed to do with the damn thing or how to respond to it. It is, obviously, a thing of beauty to actually watch and listen to, the visuals are amazing and so is the score, but beyond that I don’t know if I even like it or not. And I have experience with properly non-narrative avant-garde cinema, it’s not that I can’t cope with that sort of thing; I could still tell that I liked Zorns Lemma but kind of hated The Hart of London, to name two of Valerie’s contemporaries. Valerie herself just left me kind of bereft of even that little. I suspect I do like it more than I don’t, but… yeah. It was like that.
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