Daisies
(1966)
Directed
by: Vera Chytilová.
Written
by: Vera Chytilová & Ester Krumbachová & Pavel
Jurácek.
Starring:
Jitka Cerhová (Marie I), Ivana Karbanová (Marie II),
Julius Albert (Starsí sveták), Jan Klusák (Mladý sveták), Marie Cesková (Zena
na toaletách), Jirina Myskova (Toaletárka), Marcela Brezinová (Toaletárka), Oldrich
Hora (Sveták).
Vera
Chytilová’s Daisies is both an angry and playful film – a film about a pair of
young women, with no power in society, except when they realize how it is that
older men look at them – basically as playthings and objects, and they decide to
turn the tables. It is, in many ways, a boldly feminist film – one that pokes
at the heart of patriarchal society, and the Communist society that the film
was made in – 1966 Czechoslovakia. Of course, it ran into trouble with the
censors – they claimed not to have a problem with the content, but rather the
wastefulness of the films climatic food fight scene – but that is just a cover.
The
two women at the center of Daisies – both named Marie – are both young and
attractive – and apparently have no ties to anyone other than each other. One
is blonde, the other brunette – but in many ways, they are interchangeable – or
more accurately, they seem to act as one. They live in a society full of waste
and exploitation – and so they use the only tools at their disposal to do the
same. Their go-to move is to have the brunette go out to dinner with an older,
richer, married man – leading him on to expect sex at the end of the date. Then
the blonde shows up, gorges herself on an entire meal, before the women ditch the
older man – laughing the whole time. They high doesn’t last long though – and
soon, they are repeating the same pattern again and again.
I
fear that so far, I have made Daisies seem more linear than it is. The film
lashes out in different directions and takes digressions – it’s almost all digressions
really. Chytilová basically follows her characters wherever she feels like –
sets, locations change frequently and without warning. The color scheme will
change as well – the film all of a sudden having a red hue for instance. Any
hole anywhere may just act as a transport to somewhere else. It’s a kind of
weird, version of Alice in Wonderland.
The
film is undeniably an angry film. Angry that these two young women have no real
alternatives to do what they do, and the oppression they face. But it’s also a
very playful film – it is a film about large appetites of all kinds, and the
films has a lot of fun going over the top in its depictions of consumption –
from the massive dinners the blondes gets the older men to buy for her, to the
infamous food fight climax of the film – where the pair of women just waste
massive quantities of food in an orgy of excess. There’s also a sequence where
the girls chow down on a lot of phallic shaped food. Yes, the film is an angry
film, but you’ll recognize influences on Monty Python and Austin Powers here as
well.
And
the performances by the two actresses Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová are
both terrific. They weren’t professionals actresses – and they keep things
light throughout. As angry as the film can be, their performances never are –
they playful and goofy, and get the right, surreal tone to the film. They are
key for Chytilová’s effect for the movie itself. It is too bad that the film
faced trouble with the censors – anything in the Communist bloc would have, and
it certainly hurt Chytilová’s career. Daisies remains the most famous film of
the short-lived Czech New Wave – a strange, surreal masterwork of world cinema.
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