BY SARAH BATY

Not only was this film in a different language, the plot was hard to follow as well so that made for an interesting time! I always take notes to just keep my train of thought on the films we watch since normally we watch the film Monday and I don’t write the blog til Friday, it’s good for me to remember my thought process while watching the film. Majority of my notes this time consisted of questions to google later! Also, if anyone got the eerie feeling Valerie looked MAD familiar it’s because she looks EXACTLY like the actress who plays Violet Baudelaire in Series of Unfortunate Events, you’re welcome.

Very grateful for our reading “Valerie and Her Week of Wonders: Grandmother, What Big Fangs You Have!” by Jana Prikryl because it spends the first couple paragraphs explaining what happened and I definitely needed that. Prikryl describes Polecat as being “campily aware of his own hideousness” and that line really got me to LOL. He is pretty gross looking and gross is the correct term here because he is not as much scary as he is gross and that’s just facts. She goes on to talk about how Valerie “jolts along with the logic of hallucination” which is exactly how I felt while watching it. A giant hallucination. I was unable to tell what she was actually seeing and what really happened or if I was trippin’, but that was the allure of the movie. That’s what made it what it is. Entrapping its audience by how beautifully weird it all seemed. An allure of not ever truly knowing what was happening, you knew for sure that you knew nothing.

The theme of white is prominent throughout the film with the flower, her bedroom, the cluster of girls in white dresses, and finally her pearly white earrings that keep her out of harms way. This flows into the aesthetic of the whole movie how white represents innocence and purity. There is nothing like the old age flower symbolism. In our other reading on the Kinoeye, Tayna Krzywinska unpacks the fantastic fairytale. She first says a few words on how the ambiance of the choir-based music is so trance-inducing you can’t help but be completely invested in this soft-gothic horror story. The music combined with the significance of the white palette all adds to the overall “particular audio-visual ambience of the artifice.” She then connects the editing to the quality and completely stunning setting. The landscape is beautiful and they movie completely captures the “beauty of early summer light sparkling on water and illuminating the pastoral landscape, which is set against dark, decaying, cobweb-strewn crypts.” Describing how the aura of the film creates a surrealist imagery that gets people to tune into.