Through The Looking Glass
Jana Prikryl writes: ‘It’s one of the ironies attached to Jaromil Jireš’s gleefully gothic and priapic film “Valerie and Her Week of Wonders” — recently released on DVD and Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection—that it was made just as Czechoslovakia succumbed to the gray strictures of “normalization†following the Soviet invasion in 1968. Aside from the folkloric nub of the story—in which a thirteen-year-old girl is initiated into the perilous world of adult desire—little about this fantasia reflects its time and place.’
