Year: 1966
Director: Vera Chytilova
There are good films that are good, good films that are hard work, and a very small subset of good films that are profoundly irritating. While being good at the same time. So it is with Daisies, a 1966 film that fully deserves its poll numbers in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll as the 28th best film of all time.
Part of this irritation is definitely intentional. The two central characters, locked together in every scene, are blonde Maria and brunette Maria. The first scene, with their exaggerated high voices, childish intonations and doll-like movement set up one central idea in the film: that women are reduced to cartoon-like roles by the patriarchal society of sixties Czechoslovakia. After this prelude the main action of the film unfolds in a sequence of places in which the girls show an utter lack of respect for their male betters, and bring destruction and chaos wherever they go. They go to a restaurant and annoy the man who is paying for their meal by over-ordering. They get drunk in a nightclub and annoy the patrons. From their chaotic flat they call men and wind them up. Waiters, attendants, hairdressers and patrons are always the butt of the joke between the two of them.
Other ideas recur: the overconsumption of food, the objectification of the female body through hair, make-up, dresses, high heels that render everyday tasks more difficult; and the assumptions of older men with power and money. that young women would automatically be available and interested.
The film’s climactic scenes see the Marias stumble upon a gigantic banquet, laid out for some (presumably male) gathering. A little tasting descends into a gigantic food fight and plate smashing orgy. A very downbeat ending sees them clearing it up, proclaiming that they put everything to rights and worked hard and thus they were happy.
Might appeal to people who enjoyed:
Well perhaps people who want something different out of a film than entertainment. Like Jeanne Dielman. or Persona it challenges, enrages…
The look of this film really is extraordinary, as if Jarman, Bunuel and Vertov had teamed up. There are sudden shifts in filmstock, from colour to B and W, interpolations of stock footagev,oice overs, stills montages, and a hundred other tricks. It’s 80 minutes long, and once you’ve let go of wanting a plot, Daisies is a wild ride. Vera Chytilova has made something quite unique, and if you feel irritated (as I did) then that’s the point.
Such a cool, provocative (and yes, even annoying) film. Despite being predictably banned by the Russian invaders as anti-socialist, it is also seems partly a satire about the libidinous powers of rampant consumerism within modernity: As the end-credits note, “This film is dedicated to all those whose only source of indignation is a trampled-on trifle”. A brilliant, idiosyncratic work of 1960s feminism and Czech cinema (My other favourite film btw is Milos Forman’s very different ” Loves of a Blonde”)