3/1/2025
In a 2004 interview with Věra Chytilová, director of the 1966 Czech New Wave film Daisies, she describes fighting for her work with ignorant politicians and producers. Even threatening to jump out of a window when she was barred from working. “That's how I survived, doing these kinds of things. But it was really seizures of rage, seizures where I didn't care about anything.” Later, when asked about her recent life, Chytilová talks about finding joy in gardening and other grounded hobbies.
“We don't have enough time to do what we'd like to accomplish... I don't know how to say it…” she continues. She tells a story of how one time she left her dog on the street and it got lost. “He didn't make it home. I get cramps in my guts when I think about it because I left him there alone. That's just one example. These things are so destructive to me… or children, when they have to face a misunderstanding or some brutality of this world… the world seems to be brutal. Very brutal.” (Robert, B)
The intended message of Daisies is notoriously hard to decipher. The film was banned twice, by the Czech government and the Soviet Union, for depictions of food waste and for anarchist themes.
To me, as a young teen, this film was a colorful celebration of two women against the world - of female bonds, pure freedom, and beautiful production design. To watch Marie and Marie devour an entire banquet by themselves was cathartic, and I’d never felt more heard than by their constant and fruitless “why’s.” I was obsessed - Marie 1 was my Instagram profile picture for most of sophomore year of high school.
My reading of Daisies now, after years of countless rewatches, is one that I’m conflicted by. It feels like a betrayal of why I fell in love with the film in the first place. But I’ve found it harder to ignore what Chytilová is saying under the layers of frosting. That the Maries are living a bipolar life; unstable and unsustainable. The trope of “two crazy girls against the world,” taken to its doomed extreme. Actually, quite un-anarchist.
The film opens as Marie and Marie sit stiffly together in black and white checkered bikinis. As they move, their joints creak like wood. They declare that the world has gone bad, so they’re going bad too. They decide not to care anymore. Suddenly in a full-color field of wildflowers, they clumsily dance together and pick from an apple tree. In the very next scene, Marie 1, blonde, bobbed, and crowned with a garland, is casually attempting suicide with gas from the stovetop.
“Their creativity and destructiveness are two sides of the same coin,” Chytilova said during the 2002 Prague Film Festival in London.
“Why didn’t he notice us?” Marie 1 asks in the last third of the film, about a farmer they’ve been spying on from a cornfield. Marie and Marie bob up, then down, alternately on either side of a docked rowboat, tilting it back and forth. They wear their signature dresses - in blue and green - and thick, black eyeliner. “Why, I wonder? Why is there a river? Why? Why am I cold? Why?” They chant in unison.
We cut to a closeup of the flowing river. Then to another full-body shot of Marie 2, unsteadily standing with her black bangs over her eyes, facing the camera, and Marie 1 twisting around from behind her, saying, “there you are.” “We do exist,” she adds, and we cut to a closeup of the corn husks they’ve strewn on the cobbled streets. They know they exist because they’ve made a mess.
Later, after the Maries’ wonderfully destructive banquet and manic fashion show, we cut to water again, where the Maries are flailing in the ocean, drowning. “Is there any way to mend what’s been destroyed? Even if they had a chance, this is what it would look like,” is typed out on screen. They feverishly clean up the desecrated dining hall. Shot in black-and-white, they’re wrapped in newspaper, echoing the checkered swimsuits in the very first shot. “If we’re good and hardworking, we’ll be happy,” they whisper.
“Say that we’re happy,” Marie 1 says, looking over at Marie 2. They lay on their backs on the table, its cloth still stained and wrinkled behind them. Marie 2 rises on her elbows. “Is this a game?” she asks, smiling playfully. “It isn’t.” Marie 1 answers. Marie 2 flops back down and pauses. We cut out to a full-body wide shot, where the table they lay on is now framed by chairs precisely placed on stained carpeting. Marie 1 beams. “We’re really happy!” A pause. Then suddenly, Marie 2: “But who cares?” Immediately, the chandelier, in full color, comes crashing down from above.
In the context of where and when the film was made, the Maries are living in an oppressive, masculine, Soviet world that doesn’t comprehend the guttural energy of young women. So, they react as the Dadaists did to the horrors of WW1. They react to the metal cogs in the title sequence and the archival footage of bombs with “seizures of rage.” They lay in bed, cutting off the ends of sausages and bananas while they light their ceiling on fire. They ask each other, not infrequently, how they know they exist. “Because I can see you,” the other says. They only have each other as a reference point of their existence in a world that doesn’t understand them.
Interpretation of art “makes [it] into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.” Susan Sontag writes in Against Interpretation. “Programmatic avant-gardism” - or maybe Dadaism - “which has meant, mostly, experiments with form at the expense of content, is not the only defense against the investigation of art by interpretations. At least, I hope not. For this would be to commit art to being perpetually on the run.”
The Maries are on the run. They’ve made themselves just as brutal and destructive as the brutal and destructive world they fight. Therefore they’re not really free from anything at all, they’ve only turned themselves into a reaction. They only know they exist because they’ve made a mess. They rock the boat, and, in the final act of the film, they’re doomed to drown in the ocean. They question war and their own nature with the same viciousness, killing themselves in the process.
Chytilová is articulating a mistaken response to her own “destructive,” feelings when she sees the brutality of the world. One that has hurt her many times; a world of cruel producers who went out of their way to not only ignore her, but destroy her reputation and bar her from her passion. Through Daisies, she depicts seizures of extreme binging as one possible response to that oppression.
No matter the context, the film remains a therapeutic embrace of the appetite of young women. Chytilová has painted a portrait of two crazy girls in technicolor frosting, one that the feminine in everyone can recognize some impulses of her own in. Powerful, ancient, beautiful impulses, that Audre Lorde named as The Erotic in her speech in 1978. “We have been raised to fear […] within ourselves, our deepest cravings.”
I’m equally as obsessed with Daisies today as I was in sophomore year, but because now because it represents to me a call for balance. A question: what could true freedom look like?
In the 2004 article, Chytilová discusses politics and her lost dog with the same hopeless anger. She feels every wound of the world. “There are plenty of good memories,” she says about the past year of her life. “When I feel badly, I have plenty of other interests to help me feel better. I go to my garden and plant something. There are plenty of things to do and never enough time to do everything I would like to. I'm horrified by the fact that I can't read all the books I bought!”
True freedom, then, is in caring to tend to your garden.
Sources:
Buchar, Robert. 2004. “Věra Chytilová.” Czech New Wave Filmmakers in Interviews. North Carolina: McFarland, 51-72.
Rapold, Nicolas. “An Audience For Free Spirits in a Closed Society.” New York Times, July 1, 2012.
Sontag, Susan. 1964. “Against Interpretation.” Against Interpretation. New York: Picador, 3-14.