Věra Chytilová’s inventive Daisies is never straightforward, and more than 50 years on, it still has some kooky flashes of brilliance.
Czechoslovakia
4*
Director:
Věra Chytilová
Screenwriters:
Věra Chytilová
Ester Krumbachová
Director of Photography:
Jaroslav Kučera
Running time: 80 minutes
Original title: Sedmikrásky
Her name might be “Jarmila”, or it could be “Julie”. That is how she variously introduces herself to others. She calls her best friend “Marcelka” in public, but when they’re alone, they address each other as “Marie”. This is all beside the point, however, because the name that shines the brightest across this quirky narrative landscape is “Věra”.
The two young women in question have come to be referred to as the dark-haired “Marie I” (Jitka Cerhová) and the fair-haired “Marie II” (Ivana Karbanová), the stars of Věra Chytilová’s 1966 feature film, Daisies (Sedmikrásky). The duo is not only the story’s main characters but also the only characters of any consequence. This is their tale, and they couldn’t care less about the people around them, especially the men. (Every single scene would pass the Bechdel test with flying colours.) In fact, the same may be said of Chytilová’s attitude towards traditional narrative filmmaking.
Considered one of the highlights of the Czech New Wave, Daisies made a splash for a whole host of reasons. In the director’s native Czechoslovakia, it sparked controversy upon its release, and its local distribution was heavily suppressed after it drew the ire of the country’s president. A few months later, a deputy in the National Assembly called it “trash” and heatedly enquired what the film might offer “working people in factories, in fields and on construction sites”. One specific point of criticism he had was the film’s apparent delight in showing food wastage.
Admittedly, it does feature a stunning amount of food being wasted, and no reference is made to factories, fields or construction sites. The goal was to offer a different vision: a story that, on the surface, is far removed from the humdrum of everyday life but pokes the stifling social order by using a wild and atypical approach to depict the escapades of two happy-go-lucky girls. Chytilová issued a particular challenge to the country’s totalitarian government because her criticism was wrapped up in an exuberantly artistic sensibility – one whose subversive message was evident but difficult to define and, thus, perturbed those seeking to control creative endeavours.
In the first seven decades of the cinematic art form, a small number of films had been made by female directors, and there had been a few more starring women in the lead roles, but these two circles hardly ever overlapped. Prior to Chytilová, women were not prohibited from making films or portraying anything other than damsels in distress or femmes fatales, but her Daisies broke the mould: It was directed by a woman, written by two women (Chytilová and influential screenwriter/costume designer Ester Krumbachová) and featured its two wholly independent-minded Maries in every single scene. It had been – and remains – a rarity for women to be so fully represented in this creative triad.
But the film’s unusual nature didn’t stop there. In contrast to the more dramatic, serious films of her peers at the time, like Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, Chytilová chose to undertake a delightfully playful project. She deployed several unconventional editing techniques to inject visual surprises into her work and even undercut the male characters by having the women perform a memorable act of symbolic castration.
In the monochromatic opening scene, the Maries, wearing similarly patterned bikinis, make up their minds to shake things up. After deciding to “be bad” (in other words, to reject the status quo), they promptly jump off-screen into a brightly lit meadow, where they are shown, for the first time, in full colour. Evidently, the rather subversive implication is that being “bad” adds colour to life.
Throughout the episodic but free-flowing film, they play the children’s game Vadí nevadí (“It matters, it doesn’t matter”, similar to “Truth or Dare”) without getting flustered or hesitating to carry out each other’s wishes and, in so doing, push past social conventions. But their relationship remains undefined, and because they don’t seem to have lives beyond their friendship, they are mere ciphers, marionettes in the hands of Chytilová. At one point, sharing a bathtub filled to the brim with milk, they rightfully question whether they even exist.
Speaking of liquid being wasted, the film’s climax is a scene of such gastronomic debauchery it still hasn’t lost any of its shock value: Upon discovering a banquet-style buffet laid out in an empty hall, the two women move from one seat to the next, gorging themselves on a variety of meats, vegetables and desserts. After lobbing cakes at each other, they start throwing everything else that is edible, too, and turn the event into a proper food fight before strutting on the table, using it as a catwalk to crush the food under their high heels. All that’s missing is a literal applecart for them to upset.
The biggest twist of the knife in the heart of the regime comes a few moments later, when they suddenly decide to no longer be bad and return to being “good”: Back in monochrome, whispering to each other that hard work will make them happy, they carefully place all the broken pieces of crockery on the table, as if preparing for a meal, before lying down and meeting a grisly end. Chytilová appears to suggest that, under the strictures of communism, life is about going through the motions: You mechanically engage in (pointless) work, you pretend to be happy, and then you die – not quite the message the government wanted people to contemplate.
As she would continue to do in subsequent productions, Chytilová also shatters the illusion that men play any substantial role in women’s lives. In a very cheeky scene, Marie II uses scissors to cut a bread roll, a gherkin, some sausages, an egg and finally a banana into pieces while a man – who, significantly, is never shown – unsuccessfully tries to woo her over the phone.
But the destruction is much more widespread than a few sliced-up snacks. It also seeps into the physical manifestation of the film itself. In the restaurant, the two Maries upend convention by starting with dessert and finishing with the main course. And when Marie II devours the whole chicken she has on her plate, the camera essentially takes it personally as it begins to sputter and squirt in colour, alternately converting greys to purples, oranges, greens and blues and leaping across time. Later, to further underscore the notion that films themselves have traditionally been male, the images shatter into fragments when the Maries play with scissors.
Here and there, one can draw parallels with other films (perhaps most notably Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark 1960 film Breathless, because of the jump-cut transitions), but Daisies is indisputably sui generis. Chytilová’s creation is a joyous celebration of turning the grim and dreary communist reality on its head and replacing it with something vivid and refreshing, albeit at times maddeningly incomprehensible.
Despite the short 80-minute running time, however, many viewers today might be put off by the characters’ lack of growth. Marie I and Marie II agree on everything, quite unlike the slow identity melding of the two women in Ingmar Bergman’s cerebral Persona, released the same year. While Daisies is dynamic and reaches for ever more imaginative ways to subvert the art form and its conventions, the Maries never face any real crisis in need of a resolution.
In addition, the visual gimmicks are inconsistent and seemingly arbitrary, the film doesn’t fall neatly into a genre, and at times the actresses’ deliberately mechanical, unnatural performances render their Maries silly and hard to relate to. They are neither glorified nor put on trial for their vapid conduct and their excess. And yet, perhaps because the “bad” behaviour they so nonchalantly engage in is much more interesting than the “good”, it doesn’t matter, because their brash hedonism is positively contagious.
Daisies may be more than 50 years old, but as a collage of female expression and a light-hearted romp in the face of suffocating state control, it holds up well and continues to entertain.