This Surrealist Comedy Is an Ode to the Self-Indulgent – Armessa Movie News

The protagonists of Vĕra Chytilová’s gleefully anarchic 1966 comedy Daisies are two beautiful young women, both named Marie (although they go by a series of fake names in the movie itself). Marie I (Jitka Cerhová) is a brunette with pouty lips who wears her hair in girlish pigtails; Marie II (Ivana Karbanová) has a strawberry blonde bob and habitually dons a flower crown. After an intro sequence that rolls credits over whirring machinery and footage from World War II, the film cuts to the Maries sitting against a wooden wall like dolls in a toy box (complete with creaking joint noises), lamenting the “spoiled world” and resolving to beat it at its own game. And so the stage is set: it is a horrible day in Czechoslovakia, and two equally horrible (yet strangely likable) girls set out to cause problems on purpose.

Although Daisies has been embraced as a feminist classic, Chytilová chafed against that description; a famously prickly individual who considered herself “an overheated kettle that you can’t turn down,” she variously described her film as a “necrologue about a negative way of life” and a “philosophical documentary in the form of a farce.” But as a female director in the 1960s and an artist battling censorship from a communist government (Chytilová, alongside directors like Miloš Forman and Jiří Menzel, was part of the Czech New Wave, a film scene that blossomed in a brief moment of relative liberalization before the Soviets sent tanks in), one can’t help but sense game recognizing game as Chytilová matches the Maries’ chaotic energy with playful flourishes and surreal montages. Like Chytilová herself, the Maries reject the rules and expectations the world places upon them, defying convention and following their appetites wherever they may lead.

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The Maries Exploit and Subvert What Society Expects From Women

The Maries move through the world like some combination of pin-up models and trickster gods. They crash each other’s dates with wealthy old men, devouring expensive desserts before seeing them off at the train station, where their tearful goodbyes turn into giddy laughter. They get sloshed at a cabaret performance, blowing bubbles into their drinks and stealing the show from the performers with a dance of their own. Marie II strings along a rich young pianist and butterfly collector (Jan Klusák), who is desperately in love with her even though she mostly just wants to know if he has any food. (“At least some jam?”) When they’re not terrorizing Prague’s most eligible bachelors, the Maries hang out in their collage-art apartment, where they write phone numbers on the walls, discuss death while bathing in milk, and decapitate each other with scissors. (They’re fine, don’t worry.)

The Maries perform femininity, with their cherubic looks and the most hilariously annoying giggles this side of Amadeus, but one gets the sense that this performance is just another joke from these merry pranksters: call it “malicious gender compliance.” To suit their needs, they exaggerate some feminine clichés while subverting others. Society expects men to pay for their dates, so these two exploit it for all it’s worth; society expects women to be youthful and innocent, so they act like overgrown children for their own amusement. But society also expects women to be gentle and delicate, two words which could never describe tornadoes of vice like the Maries. One particularly telling moment shows them doing their makeup in a women’s bathroom, a stereotypical place of feminine camaraderie, where they promptly steal from another woman’s purse. Rejecting the selflessness expected from women as well as the collectivism of their society, the Maries are out for themselves; other people might as well not exist.

‘Daisies’ Is Pure Experimental Fun

Chytilová matches the Maries’ chaotic energy every step of the way. Daisies is the fun kind of experimental film: packed with surreal flourishes and idiosyncratic touches, it truly feels like anything could happen. In the opening scene, Marie I slaps Marie II so hard she teleports to the Garden of Eden, expressed through a jump cut that transitions from black-and-white to full color. (The film will jump back and forth between the two throughout.) When Marie II blows bubbles in her drink, the overflow is shown as a shimmering stream of rainbow confetti; elsewhere, a train ride becomes an impressionistic smear of color. Every so often, dizzying montages burst through the film like a speeding bus, flicking through butterflies or curls of paper in time with music — or in complete silence. At one point, the Maries go so crazy with scissors that they cut through the film itself, fragmenting the action into squiggly little blocks.

It all culminates in a scene where the Maries chance upon a banquet apparently intended for some functionaries of the state. As they do with just about every piece of food in the movie, they gorge themselves upon it in the sloppiest, clumsiest way possible, eating fistfuls of seafood and ripping apart roast chicken. Eventually, their revelry reaches new heights: they’re throwing cake at each other, treating the table as their catwalk, swinging from the chandelier. Finally, right as it hits a fever pitch, it cuts to the two girls being dunked in a lake, frightened and apologetic, promising to be good from then on. But one should never bet on the Maries being normal; indeed, as they return to the banquet hall, cleaning up their mess while whispering socialist bromides like Smeagol, it feels like they’re doing a bit. At the end, the Maries are ostensibly crushed by a chandelier, but it’s hard to believe death has any sway over these delightful demons. You may as well mourn Bugs Bunny.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, last year’s word of the year was “goblin mode”: “a type of behavior which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.” Born from a joke post about Kanye West and Julia Fox, there are a bevy of think pieces about goblin mode: as a pandemic coping mechanism, as a middle finger to late capitalism, as an act of radical feminism. But the Maries beat us all to the punch by almost 60 years, and I doubt they’d think too deeply about it. They may have gone goblin mode in response to a “spoiled world,” but eventually it became an affirmation of a simple fact they chanted to themselves while marching down the street: “We exist! We exist! We exist!”