Plot

Surreal dream-like tale that combines several themes into one fantastical world.

A thief awakens 13-year-old Valerie, taking earrings left to her by her mother. By morning, the earrings have been returned, Valerie's first period has begun, and a troupe and a missionary have arrived in her 19th-century town. The thief is Orick; he reports to a cloaked constable who may also be the missionary. Attention to sexuality is everywhere: Valerie's grandmother's puritanical nature, the missionary's sermon to the town's virgins, the parish priest's attempt to seduce Valerie, and lusty adults at play. Valerie's nascent sexuality puts her in great danger. Can she navigate the passage from innocence to experience, a route teaming with vampires, a murderer, and an obscure family tree?—<jhailey@hotmail.com>

Valerie [Jaroslava Schallerová] has just come of age with her first bleeding. Babischka [Helena Anyzová] says that it's time to put away her magic earrings and attend to the missionaries who are coming to town. Valerie, however, is more interested in the performers who have arrived for Hedvica's wedding. As the celebrators pass below her dining room window, Valerie sees a "monster," a masked man whose face changes from human to a nosferatu-like vampire. Even Babischka pales when she sets eyes on him.

Now Valerie begins to see the vampire everywhere. He is the Bishop, he is the Constable, he is her boyfriend Orlik's guardian, he is the Weasel, he is Babischka's lover Richard. Babischka wishes to be young again so that Richard will find her beautiful, so she signs away her house (Valerie's inheritance) in return for a drink of Hedvica's blood on her wedding night. Babischka then shows up as Valerie's second cousin Elsa, young, beautiful, and vampire. When Valerie learns that the Vampire is dying and must have blood, she steals a chicken and feeds him the blood off her lips.

A visiting priest, another of Babischka's lovers, tells Valerie that her father was also Orlik's father, which greatly disturbs Valerie to find that she and Orlik are brother and sister, but she is more disturbed when the priest attempts to seduce her, so upset in fact that she kills herself with her magic earrings. The priest then kills himself but comes back to life. The priest convinces the town that Valerie bewitched him, so the townsfolk tie Valerie to a stake and set her on fire, but her magic earrings save her.

Suddenly, Babischka is back. She reveals to Valerie a story about how her lover Richard had two children with Valerie's mother (of which Valerie is one, of course) just as a carriage drives up and Valerie's parents get out. A hunter kills a weasel which has been eating the chickens, and much merriment ensues as the whole town turns up to celebrate. The story ends with Valerie asleep in a bed in the middle of the forest. [Synopsis by bj_kuehl]