let’s do it
by
Douglas Messerli
Věra
Chytilová, Ester
Krumbachová, and Pavel Juráček (screenplay, based on a story by Chytilová), Věra Chytilová (director) Sedmikrásky (Daisies) / 1966, USA 1967
Before
Saturday Night Live’s “two wild and
crazy guys,” the Czech emigrant Festrunk Brothers, 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, who observing that the world
has become “spoiled” and meaningless, with the Cole Porter logic of “Let’s Do
It,” determine to become “spoiled” themselves.
What follows is 70-some minutes of
Dada-like events, wherein, in full color, sepia, and several other colors, the
Maries deconstruct themselves and the patriarchal society which has attempted
turn them into objects (early on, one of the Maries declares that she has
become merely a “doll”).
Gluttony, indeed, seems to be one major
ways in this film they become “spoiled,” almost as if they 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, a few moments earlier in a fire that nearly
burned up their room).
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 does Chytilová endlessly attempt to breakdown the
limitations of filmmaking, shifting not only dozens of different lenses and
other cinematic devices, but ambitiously moving images from the realist to the
abstract. And several moments the film looks more like an early silent film or
even a cartoon reel rather than a film feature of the late 1960s.
A narrator suggests that, given a chance,
the two might have wanted to make amends, but when we see 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 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 innovative works of
the Czech New Wave.
Los Angeles,
January 12, 2017
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