Las pervertidas

Daisies is a wonderful embodiment of the Prague Spring. Hedonism and consumerism get criticised while the inflammatory criticism is coded more subtly. At a time when Stalinism was being re-examined and the reputations of many Czechs were being "rehabilitated", Daisies was a well-masked critique of these reforms. The crazy 1960s cinematography, the strange accents of the two main characters, and the sheer hedonism (the economy was quite poor at the time) give a surreal edge to what is not a surreal film. The film also hints of a Czechoslovakia identifying with Western Europe and impatient with the regime -- despite its reforms. The cinematography is fun and the story is a definite upending of the usual role of women in Czech films. If you're looking for deep symbolism, you'll be disappointed. But as a fun romp, a sign of the times, and a historical piece, Daisies is superb.

To take this film way out of context, I've got to believe that nine out of ten Miranda July fans would enjoy this film made in 1966 well before Little Miss Moviola was born. Indeed, I would recommend this film for anyone in the mood for a non-linear romp. The film is a cut-up, not just comical...but even as sort of visual equivalent of Brion Gysin's dreammachine.

In particular there is a scene with scissors that was captivating, not in being a "cutting edge" special effect, but in embracing the hands-on art-for-art sake editing. Through out the film Colors come and go, blossoming and wilting like the "Daisies" of the title. Or perhaps "Daisies" are cited for their ability to sprout up under peculiar conditions. An antidote to the bummer that face trummerflora in the midst of any upheaval.

That director Vera Chytilova was doing this under the watchful, and at best blind, eye of Comrade Censor, I think can attribute to the film's non-linear approach. Perhaps part defense-mechanism, perhaps part lyrical lysergic reaction to the disciplined times, the film surely wants to defy something, but settles for defying classification. Ironically, that might be what makes these well cut "Daisies" fresh to this day. A silent film with sound. A black and white film that bursts into colors.

I went in knowing nothing about the "Czech New Wave" and in now reading around, it seems this is the wrong film from which to build a center about. I still know nothing, but I am at least intrigued. Indeed, I was certain one of the two main Marie's was the filmmaker herself. Wrong! The fact that Chytilova made this when she was 36 or so is almost as impressive as making it in the political climate of the time.

The film is extremely playful, and the actresses deserve much praise that has heretofore been lacking. If you enjoyed the film, and clearly I did while others at IMDb did not, a key is that there is something about the two leads, beyond their costumes that snares our attention. Although I do think garlands and veils should find themselves into more femme's fatal fashion... Oh and since I'm older than this film, I kept seeing the two actresses as Carol Burnett and maybe Joanne Worley?!?! Any ways the two seem to be truly delighting themselves, and one wonders if some of the madness was improvised on the spot. Or were they really just puppets as the initial scene suggests??

Anyways, this film is as artful as it is ambiguous. I was enjoying my modern-day interpretation, knowing full well that it was wrong. That interpretation is that women have replaced their sex drive with a food urge, but must leverage the less evolved male's sex drive to satisfy their advanced needs. And again, I confess to crimes against the state and more importantly the film, I *know* I am wrong. Stamping my own ideas on the fragile frames of the film.

Similarly, the flower-power of the 60's in the US could pollinate the film and be seen a diatribe against that which is drab. But again, that appears to be all hippy, and none too hip to the intention.

The film maker, in a 1975 letter addressed to "Comrade President" (her phrase for Gustav Husak) wrote

"Daisies" was a morality play showing how evil does not necessarily manifest itself in an orgy of destruction caused by the war, that its roots may lie concealed in the malicious pranks of everyday life. I chose as my heroines two young girls because it is at this age that one most wants to fulfill oneself and, if left to one's own devices, his or her need to create can easily turn into its very opposite."

By the way, the full letter was on the DVD.

I don't know, I still think this is a film that begs to be taken out of context...and certainly plucked off of dusty shelves and seen by many today. Show it to kids, I bet they'll laugh at this like they would at "Laurel and Hardy" or "Buster Keaton."

7/10 Thurston Hunger

This was the most pleasurable thing I've ever watched. The scenes were beautifully put together. The style changed from black and white to sepia to colourful, sometimes with a blueish tint, sometime with other colours. I loved the saccadic camera movements that matched certain sounds, e.g. a phone ringing. The actresses' styling (clothes, hair, makeup) was also beautiful. The music was very good (e.g. an epic battle kind of piece of music during the cake fight between the girls). I liked the fact that the plot's point was to explore how the girls' reaction to the world's "badness" will end. But there were certain points that I didn't quite understand. I didn't really like how the girls sometimes spoke in a robotic manner, or how they seemed too naive and silly. Maybe that was the point: perfection isn't art anyway. I appreciate the fact that the director (Vera Chytilova) made this film in a time when women didn't have the freedom they have today. One of the main themes in the film is women breaking the barriers of the society they live in, and the rules dictating their behaviour. It really is emblematic in that sense. Overall I really enjoyed watching this film, but I didn't get where the plot was going, and where it actually went, plus the details I mentioned. But I would recommend it to anyone.

Chytilova surpasses even the genial Jiri Menzel in her blissful critique of the pieties and austerities associated with the Czech Stalinist regime under President Husak. DAISIES is an exercise in revolutionary modernism, anarch-dadaist in spirit and form. 21 deputies objected in parliament to the extravagant waste of food in the film, and Chytilova had to defend her film on communist-moral grounds: i.e. the two female protagonists (Marie 1 Jitka Cerkova, Marie 2 Ivana Karbanova) were spoilt brats to be condemned as so much waste-matter in the body politic of the workers' state. But we know that they are feminist anarchists, living (in terms of the plot narrative) off silly old men who buy them dinners, and (in terms of the poetic texture of the film) calling everything into question with the unquenchable brio of cartoon characters (they eat even photographs of food from glossy magazines). We, the audience, are happily infected (even today in the new millennium) by the blessed spirit of nihilism Chytilova has conjured up in those dangerous and exhilarating days of the Prague Spring. First there was Kafka (AMERIKA), then there was Hasek (THE GOOD SOLDIER SVEJK), and then there was Vera Chytilova. DAISIES is in my top ten films ever made.

The opening of 'Daisies' features a montage of two subjects very familiar to 1966 Eastern Bloc film audiences: work and war, as shots of an industrial machine alternate with views of rubbling city from an airplane bomber's point of view. These are masculine subjects in a very masculine culture. Or they seem to be. The machine features a circular mechanism, and represents repetition, but also productivity, and might be said to represent female principles, whereas the war footage is of pure destruction. The heroines of 'Daisies' embody both these gender-specific realms, and manage to create something new. They are idle, but, like George Costanza, their indolence depends on relentless invention. They are destructive, but out of the destruction they produce something new.

'Daisies' was a product of the Czech New Wave, but seems a million miles away from its most famous contemporaries, the films of Menzel and Forman. These latter, though liberal and anti-totalitarian, were artistically conservative - deliberately humanist works, where 'real', psychologically plausible characters exist in 'real' places, and every narrative progression makes logical sense. If they seem 'timeless' to us now, it is because they didn't truly engage with their own times.

And, of course, they were male. Where they seem closer to the 19th century novel, or classic Hollywood cinema, Chytilova's peers are the great European modernists, Godard, Paradjanov, Makajev, Rivette, or the plays of Ionesco. Where Forman and Menzel framed their illusions of realism in formal coherence, Chytilova revels in formal instability. These aren't psychologically plausible characters in a cause-and-effect universe. We first meet the two Maries after the opening credits, and their automaton gestures, with accompanying sound effects, continue the movement of the machine.

The plot basically consists of the girls trying to chat up old men who'll feed them, but what they really do is make a nonsense of plot. The recurring motif is the posy of roses worn by Marie II, and thrown by her to further the story - we remember the nursery rhyme 'a ring a ring of rosies, a pocketful of posies, a tishoo, a tishoo, we all fall down'. And everything falls down here, in a game where the rules have splintered and fragmented.

The film mixes monochrome, colour, and unstably tinted scenes. Sequences that begin 'sensibly' are broken down, by slapstick, changes of register, 'impossible' changes of location or physics, or are turned from natural scenes into the robotic movements of a clockwork toy going out of control. This disruption has a theoretical point - in one scene, the girls find their bodies cut up as they find their identities dissolved by conflicting desires, social expectations and representations. In another, they wander around a dream space, wondering why people pay no attention to them, realising that 'logically', they mustn't exist, because Western culture has no place for them.

Just as they parody the notions of work and war (in the climactic food orgy, martial army music soundtracks a cake fight), so these sprites play with and destroy the assumptions of Western humanism, its claims to adequately represent 'reality', especially in a time of such bewildering, radical change, as in the 1960s. They do to cinema what Ionesco did to literature, cut it into shreds.

The whole thing plays like parody Godard, with Marie II as Anna Karina, with meaningful conversations about love accompanied by the girls cutting up sausages and bananas: the butterfly sequence is a wicked lampoon of 'Vivre sa Vie'. Where Godard's heroines remained fixed and stared at, the two Maries laugh, look, escape, see their frame and break it, insist on their body as something more than an object, something they can play with themselves.

Not even the heroines' liberating subversivess is fixed - their mindless appetite is punished as often as their formal iconoclasm is celebrated. But for all its theoretical rigour, 'Daisies' never sacrifices its sense of humour - I first saw it when I was ten, and loved it for its slapstick fun, its narrative unpredictability, its playful soundtrack, and its tireless visual invention. I still love it now.