Sometimes, it’s worth giving a film a second chance and your full attention. My only previous experience with 1966’s Daisies was watching a snippet of it in a film history class back in college, I believe of the opening scene of the movie. The film starts off in such a strange, disorienting place that I wasn’t sure I liked the unhinged absurdity the film was going for. So I put off revisiting it for a long time, despite the fact that I’ve made a concerted effort to seek out important films by women filmmakers over the years. Well, turns out I just needed to watch the whole damn film, as its very particular, anything-goes nature takes a while to get used to, but once you do, it makes for one of the more singular films I can recall seeing.
It’s a little hard to explain what exactly the plot of Daisies is, but most of its ethos is contained in that aforementioned first scene. Two bikini-clad girls named Marie I (played by Jitka Cerhová) and Marie II (Ivana Karbanová) declare that if the whole world has gone bad, then why shouldn’t they? One of them then hurls the other off screen before the film turns from black and white to color and one of them inexplicably lands in a lake, establishing the nonsensical nature of the film’s visual style, which is constantly switching between black and white, color, monochrome, and these weird trippy overlaid images. From there, they go on several dates with older rich men and end up teasing or playing tricks on them, you know, just because it’s fun to be cruel.
I wish I could explain more of the plot, but I’m not sure what there is to say, other than that Marie I and Marie II spend most of their time going from restaurant to restaurant, acting foolish and causing mayhem. Food is a huge part of their disregard for norms, as they’re constantly playing with and eating large portions of food, often in bougie backdrops. The film then ultimately concludes with one of the more repulsive food scenes I’ve seen, complete with unappetizing chewing noises and a food fight between our two friends. Supposedly, this was the scene that got the film banned in Czechoslovakia, because a member of parliament took issue with the film’s depiction of food waste when there was famine going on, but I’d venture to guess it had more to do with the film’s anti-establishment aesthetic.
And that’s where the joys of this film really lie: in how chaotic and anarchic the filmmaking is, and yet the fact that there are clearly a lot of ideas behind it about society, the patriarchy, capitalism, socialism, etc. This is a film that feels very much like it was made in the aftermath of the French New Wave (and was a part of Czechoslovakia’s own New Wave) and right in the midst of the freedom and social revolution that we would come to associate with the ’60s. The film starts with a montage of war and bombings, but then proceeds to have this stealthily silly tone that features all different kinds of editing and visuals, while strictly adhering to the idea that these characters really don’t care about anything society expects from them, and there’s something weirdly liberating about watching it all unfold.
I feel like on this blog we’ve often talked about how the art you like the most is the hardest to talk about, perhaps because there’s just something transcendent about it that doesn’t feel worth picking apart. That’s especially true with Daisies because it feels like the kind of film that much more observant people of the opposite sex have written various papers about in college feminist studies classes over the years. Chytilová supposedly didn’t consider herself a feminist filmmaker, but the film’s abundant ideas about women’s places in society are hard not to construe as anything but feminist. Either way, it’s just an off-kilter joy to watch the way the film plays around with these ideas, but also does it with the irreverence of a Laurel and Hardy short, but if Laurel and Hardy had the same name and an appetite for destruction.