Daisies (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Directed by Vĕra Chytilová; screenplay by Ester Krumbachová and Vĕra Chytilová based on a story by Vĕra Chytilová and Pavel Juráček; edited by Miloslav Hájek; cinematography by Jaroslav Kučera; set design by Karel Lier; costume design by Ester Krumbachová; music by Jiří Šust and Jiří Šlitr; starring Jitka Cerhová, Ivana Karbanová, Marie Češková, Jiřina Myšková, Marcela Březinová, Julius Albert, Oldřich Hora, Jan Klusák, and Jaromír Vomáčka. Blu-ray, color and B&W, Czech dialogue with English subtitles, 76 min., 1966. A Criterion Collection release.

Daisies is as eclectic, kaleidoscopic, prismatic, and anarchic as any major production of the Czechoslovak New Wave that flourished all too briefly in the Sixties, but no adjective captures the uncompromising essence of Vĕra Chytilová’s unique 1966 production. Her first feature, the aptly named Something Different, had helped to launch the New Wave three years earlier, and she remained a leading figure in the movement alongside Miloš Forman, Vojtĕch Jasný, Jaromil Jireš, Jiří Menzel, and a few others. Most were graduates of Prague’s enterprising Film and Television Academy of the Performing Arts (FAMU), which gave remarkable leeway to experimentation as government censorship eased in the years before 1968, when Alexander Dubček became head of the country’s Communist Party and the liberalized Prague Spring era ushered in a short-lived period of “socialism with a human face” that ended with a Soviet-led invasion and a return to the pre-Dubček status quo.

Chytilová studied philosophy and architecture in college and worked in diverse occupations—fashion model, photography technician, continuity supervisor—before entering FAMU as its youngest-ever female directing student. Her expertly crafted student films A Bagful of Fleas and Ceiling (both 1962) played in theaters, and not long thereafter Something Different won the top prize at a German festival. But it was Daisies that made her reputation as a world-class talent and a world-class maverick. Its new Blu-ray edition is visually stunning even by the high standards of The Criterion Collection, and the well-chosen extras include both of the aforementioned student films as well as two short documentaries on Chytilová and the New Wave contingent. Jasmina Blažević’s Journey: Portrait of Vĕra Chytilová (2004) looks into the director’s life and personality, showing her as a devoted artist with a strong attachment to homelife and motherhood. Daniel Bird’s Naughty Young People: Chytilová, Kučera, Krumbachová (2012) sketches her creative ideas and her relationships with Jaroslav Kučera, her husband and sometime cinematographer, and Ester Krumbachová, a multitalented writer and designer. Both were key figures in the New Wave scene.

Lest one be lulled by the decorous title of Daisies, the film’s first and last images are technological, not floral, and aggressively technological to boot: footage of bomb explosions in wartime, intercut with close-ups of an industrial machine cranking away at some unknown task. The explosions foreshadow the social and cultural unruliness that drives much of the narrative, and the machinery prefigures the emotionless, almost robotic personalities of the main characters. Played by nonprofessional actors, blonde Ivana Karbanová and brunette Jitka Cerhová, both are named Marie, and both are devoid of personality in any ordinary sense of the term. We first see them sitting on a blanket in bikinis, as if summer fun were in the offing, but they quickly announce their boredom and disgust with everything and anything, deciding that in this hopelessly bad world they might as well be bad themselves. One of them slaps the other and both tumble into a wildflower patch, the movie tumbles from black and white into fulsome color, and their jerky movements turn into a jerky dance around an apple tree, recalling the Garden of Eden and introducing a favorite Chytilová trope that returns in such subsequent pictures as Fruit of Paradise (1970) and The Apple Game (1977). In a series of rapid cuts the Marias horse around in a bedroom, walk down a carpeted staircase, and preen before a mirror. And so it goes throughout the discontinuous, discombobulated film. The visuals lurch from color to monochrome to black and white; the editing leaps through time and space as if they didn’t exist. A few constants unify the action, most notably the affectless speech tones of the Marias, their robustly antisocial behavior, and the infatuation with food and scandalous table manners that propels them through nightmarish dates with dignified gents in fancy restaurants. But the movie is a law unto itself, as antithetical to rules as its iconoclastic antiheroines are. Pretty much anything goes.

This was Chytilová’s plan from the outset. During her FAMU years, she says in Naughty Young People, she and her colleagues found that typical Czech cinema was “filmed theater, photographed theater” that “didn’t try to affect the viewer artistically…We realized that film should be used to express what can’t be communicated using a different creative language.” When preparing the screenplay for Daisies, she and cowriter Krumbachová wanted to “try everything possible” and blow up existing paradigms. Hence the focus on off-kilter protagonists “who want to have fun but don’t know how. They’re bored, they have a sense of pranks and humor…And they’re basically reaching out to touch their existence, its limits.” As film programmer Irena Kovarova points out in another Criterion extra, the Marias identify themselves as “virgins” in the opening scene, but the same word can be translated as “dolls,” underscoring their existential ambiguity—seen one way they’re humans, seen another they’re automatons. This is hardly an orthodox way to convey the feminism that many commentators find in Daisies, but Chytilová rejected the feminist label, which she found too doctrinaire for comfort. She was very concerned with the position of women in Czech society, though, and Kovarova detects this concern in every one of her projects, including those that were aborted in the early Seventies when her opposition to socialist-realist principles got her banned from filmmaking for several years.

In and around its puzzlements and perplexities, Daisies explores a number of clearly identifiable themes. One is the idea of destruction, manifested in countless details of gesture and décor as well as the overall fragmentation of the movie itself, especially in the rapid montage sequences, the moments when the Marias slice up foodstuffs or set fire to their apartment, and a lunatic episode when they cut each other up with scissors and cavort around the screen as segmented body parts. Kovarova mentions this motif and also the ubiquitous games that the Marias play, amusing themselves half to death until the games eventually take over and almost start playing the protagonists. This culminates in the final scenes, when Maria and Maria wander into a banquet hall elegantly set for what’s probably an impending meeting of Party big shots; there they go to work trashing every item in sight, do a wretched job of cleaning up the total mess they’ve made, and then land in bed where they lie wrapped neatly in newspapers. Happy ending! Until an enormous chandelier abruptly materializes overhead and crashes down on them, followed by a reprise of the apocalyptic bomb blasts. Unhappy ending. The Phantom of the Opera meets Dr. Strangelove.  

In their audio commentary for the Criterion release, Bird and Peter Hames observe that Daisies was favorably reviewed in Czechoslovakia, and critic Carmen Gray reports in her program essay that it did well with audiences until the “positive reception of such a radical film led a member of Parliament to issue an official critique,” whereupon it was taken off the screen; later it re-emerged but was banned a second time when the Soviets clamped down. Such bureaucratic hostility wasn’t surprising at a time when the dictates of socialist realism disdained experimentation and “elitism” was a cuss word. By my reckoning, the keenly experimental lineage of Daisies lies not in mass-appeal cinema but in the theories of Soviet avant-gardist Vsevolod Meyerhold a century ago, advocating techniques of presentational, “biomechanical” acting that uncannily anticipate the performances of Karbanová and Cerhová, who embody the Maria dolls so thoroughly that any sense of psychological depth or emotional resonance is foreclosed; there are times when they remind me of the Kipper Kids or Ernie Kovacs’s immortal Nairobi Trio, and their routines are closer to performance art than to movie acting.

Suggesting probable influences on the film, Hames and Bird cite the extemporaneous, medium-blurring Happenings of the Sixties and the surrealism of Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, although they rightly note that the tone of Daisies is more Dadaist than surrealist. I’ll add that more than a few of Jean-Luc Godard’s precedent-shattering Sixties ventures have a great deal in common with Chytilová’s achievement here. As to the ideology of Daisies, the evident bleakness of its finale raises the question of whether its social critique ultimately veers into nihilism, and in Naughty Young People the composer Jan Klusák, who plays a small role in Daisies, says it arguably does. “Anarchy rules it,” he says of the picture. “Because of the Communists, she had to claim it was about morality, that she wanted to point at the girls’ poor manners and how badly they turn out. But, in reality, that’s not what it was. The movie is more of a skepsis over the triviality of the world. It is nihilism, yes.” Gray makes a similar observation, writing that the Marias are “in touch with humanity’s endless potential for defiant revolt” yet “possess no defined vision of the future and are as vertiginously close to nihilism as they are to absolute freedom.” I concur, although Bird and Hames make sense when they say the film’s energy and high spirits keep all-out nihilism at a distance.

Daisies had good company when it was banned—such worthy items as Jan Nĕmec’s A Report on the Party and Guests (1966), Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball (1967), and Jasný’s All My Good Countrymen (1969) also went into the vault—and Klusák puts the blame for these ridiculous proscriptions on sheer censorial ignorance. “The Communists banned everything they didn’t understand,” he muses. “They banned it just in case.” Among other transgressions, Daisies was charged with disrespecting Czech agriculture, and, yes, the Marias sure do trash that banquet hall. Chytilová was barred from the Czech film industry in 1969, and after several years of enforced inactivity she was allowed back into the fold, although officialdom’s heavy hand was always nearby, and it’s widely agreed that she became more cautious in her experimentalism. Daisies is now an acknowledged classic and certainly her best-known work, although for me her debut feature, Something Different, is better, brilliantly interweaving fiction and nonfiction with its alternating depictions of a woman in a strained marriage and a noted gymnast training for a decisive competition. Daisies would not have been the same if not for the contributions of Krumbachová, who collaborated on the screenplay and designed the astoundingly broad array of costumes, and Kučera, whose fascination with color is one of the picture’s strongest assets. Stunningly vibrant colors also distinguish the Blu-ray edition, which remains delightful to the eyes even when the singsong droning of the dolls grows wearisome to the ears.

When she visited New York for a Lincoln Center screening of Daisies in 1967, Chytilová startled everyone by revealing that despite the seemingly improvised aura of its antics, the film made use of a carefully prepared shooting script, which it indeed did, even though much of its final shape was probably determined in the editing room. Blending the comic and the catastrophic, the preplanned and the spontaneous, the entertaining and the outrageous, Daisies pulses with the vigor of a young woman aspiring to “do the impossible” in cinema. She came close.

David Sterritt is editor-in-chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, film professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and author or editor of fifteen film-related books.

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