Věra Chytilová | Sedmikrásky (Daisies) / 1966, USA 1967

let’s do it

by Douglas Messerli

 

Věra Chytilová, Esster Krumbachová, and Pavel Juráček (screenplay, based on a story by Chytilová), Věra Chytilová (director) Sedmikrásky (Daisies) / 1966, USA 1967

 

Long before Saturday Night Live’s “two wild and crazy guys,” the Czech emigrant Festrunk brothrs, Czech director Věra Chytilová wrote of two wild and crazy gals in her film Daisies. The “daisies,” in this case, who insist they are sisters, but may, in fact, be only close friends, are both named Marie (Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová), who observing that the world had become “spoiled” and meaningless, with the logic of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It,” determine not only to fall in love Thelma and Louise-style (in the 1991 film), but aim at becoming “spoiled” themselves.

     What follows is 70 some minutes of Dada-like events, wherein, in full color, sepia, and other techniques of coloration, the Maries deconstruct themselves and the patriarchal society which has attempted to turn them into objects. Early on, one of the Maries declares that she has become merely a “doll,” that world also meaning “virgin” in Czech.

     Their first act is to frolic across a field with a single tree brimming with applies, which suggests that they have suddenly become Eve-like figures, tempting the men around them so that the entire society might fall. Indeed, throughout this amazing mash-up of cinema techniques, they are seen dining with older, married men who must end up paying for the huge meals they together consume.

    Gluttony seems to be one of the major ways through which they become “spoiled,” behaving almost as if they were attempting not just to trick their victims—leaving them generally in the lurch as the males with whom they dine run to catch their trains back to their wives—but to consume, to literally eat up the society itself.

    At one point, we see the feminist logic to these actions as they slice up various phallic-shaped food stuffs, including bananas, croissants, and sausages (grilled, for a few moments earlier in a fire that nearly burned up their room).

   But “spoiled,” in this case, also includes testing the limits of their own relationship—cutting away each other’s body parts as if they were paper dolls and/or store window mannequins—and of close women friends such as an elderly bathroom attendant who attempts to keep them near her by serving coffee, and from whom they steal a few coins.

    What is clear is that both the characters and director are testing the limits of their own transgressions, and together they inventively imagine ways to challenge the system in which they are trapped. While the woman are observed as constantly seeking new ways to “spoil” themselves, so dose Chytilová endlessly attempt to break down the limitations of filmmaking, shifting not only dozens of different lenses and other cinematic devices, but ambitiously moving images from the realist into the abstract. And several moments of the film look more like an early silent film or even a cartoon reel rather than a feature film of the late 1960s.

    Such willful destruction, obviously, can end only in one way. The two Maries break to a Communist Party banquet, playfully eating up nearly all the food before the presumably mostly male diners have even entered the room while dancing across the long banquet table, all of which ends in a farcical food fight before the two, swinging from a class chandelier, fall to their deaths by, strangely enough, drowning.

    A narrator suggests that, given a chance, the two might have wanted to make amends; but when we observe the Maries attempting to clear up their mess and put the impossibly broken plates and silverware back in place, we know that they would never have been able to “fix it up.”

    Chytilová’s work, in turn, was banned for “depicting the wanton” (the censors claimed that the director had used up too much food in the filming), and the director herself was banned for several years from filmmaking.

    Today we recognize this droll movie not only as a brilliant feminist work, but as one of the most innovated films of the Czech New Wave.

 

Los Angeles, January 12, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2017).