Review of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) by Mike M — 09 Sep 2011

Every set is overrun (overwrought?) with nature imagery, some of which - a woman writhing in the roots of a tree (did Lars von Trier revisit this before making "Antichrist"?), Valerie swimming among water lilies - can immediately be filed away under the heading of soft-focus 1970s kitsch.

Yet many more of its images (bodies hanging out of windows, a courtyard littered with chicken corpses, the antiseptic white of Valerie's bedroom) will stick in your head, and the final sequence, in particular, is simply ravishing.

.. A tendency to cloak its more surreal flourishes in billowing curtains dulls some of its force, but it retains a heady blast of strangeness: if the Svankmajer of "Alice" and the David Hamilton of "Bilitis" had ever had cause to collaborate, the results would probably have looked something akin to this.