 |
| Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová in Daisies |
Girls just wanna have fun. The adjective usually applied to Vera Chytilová's Daisies is "anarchic," but that doesn't quite apply to a film so cleverly staged, photographed, and edited. To be sure, the impish young women whose adventures the film chronicles are in some sense anarchists, in that they try to break all the rules they can find to break. And if you're looking for the conventional beginning-middle-end narrative structure you won't find one. But Daisies is not just Dadaist nose-thumbing. It's framed by images of the mass destruction of war, against which, the film seems to be saying, the sheer mad hedonism of its two uninhibited sprites should be viewed as trivial. Chytilová takes her cue not only from Dada but also from the Marx Brothers, whose antics would be appalling in real life but are liberating to the spirit when viewed in the context of a work of art. Daisies is akin in this sense to an apocalyptic comedy like Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, made only two years earlier, and its spirit and some of its techniques come from Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night, also from 1964. They reflect an era when youth thought it could change the world, only to be put down, as the Czech filmmakers like Chytilová would brutally be put down, by the establishment it so gleefully mocked. That Daisies can be grating as often as it is giddy suggests an awareness that the road of excess may lead to the palace of wisdom, but not without paying a price.
No comments:
Post a Comment