Daisies

This is really worth seeing. It's hard to explain why. There is no plot. There is no character development. There is a lot of beautiful surrealism. Like with anything from Dada and related art, the full effect only hits you after you stop asking "Why?" and "Whaa?" and "What the hell?". When you past that point, you'll have a great time.

The charming nihilism captured in the movie is something that we couldn't duplicate nowadays, even if we tried.

Terrific surreal comedy combined with biting social commentary. From the very first scene, the film presents a world that is both deeply absurd and eerily familiar, drawing the viewer in with its off-kilter humor and playful tone.

The two lead actresses, Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová, give stunning performances as the two young women who gleefully embark on a series of outrageous adventures, from dining on mountains of food to wreaking havoc at a fancy dinner party. Their chemistry is electric, and their anarchic energy carries the film's narrative to its satisfyingly bizarre conclusion.

But beneath the surface of this madcap romp lies a deeper message about the nature of society and the roles we are expected to play within it. The film's critiques of consumerism, gender roles, and societal expectations are just as relevant today as they were in 1966, and the film's surreal visuals and absurdist humor make those critiques all the more potent.

Daisies is a great piece of cinematic art, a bizarre comedy that you can't look away from, with a trenchant social commentary that is just as relevant today as it was over 50 years ago.

Chytilova surpasses even the genial Jiri Menzel in her blissful critique of the pieties and austerities associated with the Czech Stalinist regime under President Husak. DAISIES is an exercise in revolutionary modernism, anarch-dadaist in spirit and form. 21 deputies objected in parliament to the extravagant waste of food in the film, and Chytilova had to defend her film on communist-moral grounds: i.e. the two female protagonists (Marie 1 Jitka Cerkova, Marie 2 Ivana Karbanova) were spoilt brats to be condemned as so much waste-matter in the body politic of the workers' state. But we know that they are feminist anarchists, living (in terms of the plot narrative) off silly old men who buy them dinners, and (in terms of the poetic texture of the film) calling everything into question with the unquenchable brio of cartoon characters (they eat even photographs of food from glossy magazines). We, the audience, are happily infected (even today in the new millennium) by the blessed spirit of nihilism Chytilova has conjured up in those dangerous and exhilarating days of the Prague Spring. First there was Kafka (AMERIKA), then there was Hasek (THE GOOD SOLDIER SVEJK), and then there was Vera Chytilova. DAISIES is in my top ten films ever made.

For its renewal of the spirit of DADA, for its sixties potlatch, for its fine excess, for its playful modernist montage, this is certainly the most formally revolutionary of all the Czech New Wave films I have seen. It escapes and transcends the heavy moral dissidence of the other great Prague Spring directors, and even manages to transcend its time and place. An authentic work of creative genius, its 'high spirits' belong to another world, a world which subverts the grip of everyday totalitarianism, and, as DADA updated, topples the philistines left and right.

I first (and only) saw this film in 1967 at Antioch in the auditorium with scores of other impressionable hippies. I was totally in love with this film and thought the final sequences of the wrecked banquet and what followed were very cool. I have looked for his movie for years, even rented "closely watched trains" thinking it might be the one as I couldn't remember the english title. However, and thanks to the WEB, we just found this and I can not recommend it highly enough. It is a blueprint for wonderful female (mis)behavior and should be required watching in women's studies classes. I am so excited to find that I may now be able to rent/buy this that I wanted to share my comments in case some other veteran of those good old days remembers this film. If you are out there, write to me so we can share our pleasure in this film and the radical women film writers/directors/actors!!!