Fruit of Paradise (Vera Chytilová, 1970)

Jitka Novátková and Karel Novák in Fruit of Paradise

Cast: Jitka Novátková, Karel Novák, Jan Schmid. Screenplay: Vera Chytilová, Ester Krumbachová. Cinematography: Jaroslav Kucera. Art direction: Vladimir Labsky. Film editing: Miroslav Hájek. Music: Zdenek Liska. 

Vera Chytilová's Fruit of Paradise opens with an acid-trip account of the story of Adam and Eve and the serpent, set against an oratorio-like chorus singing the biblical text set to music by Zdenek Liska. We have scarcely recovered from this prologue when we are thrust into a different kind of paradise that seems to be a health retreat, with another Eve (Jitka Novátková) offering her husband, Josef (Karel Novák), fruit plucked for the tree they're sitting under. He refuses it, but when he says he's hungry, so goes off to forage some herbs for his snack. While she's cutting them, she's almost pissed on by Robert (Jan Schmid), another guest at the spa. And so begins a loopy series of encounters in which, among other things, Eve discovers that Robert may be a serial killer. Make of it what you will, but Fruit of Paradise was Chytilová's farewell to the kind of avant-garde filmmaking that led to her being unemployed in the Czech film industry after the Soviet crackdown on art that it didn't understand but sort of felt was subversive. From our point of view, the only thing it subverts is traditional narrative and cinematic technique. No, it's not as deliciously accessible as Daisies, Chytilová's 1966 breakthrough film. It's a ragged, itchy film that tests the audience's patience while also demonstrating the potential of the motion picture as art. 

Calamity (Vera Chytilová, 1982)

Bolek Polívka in Calamity

Cast: Bolek Polívka. Dagmar Bláhovká, Jana Synková, Marie Pavliková, Jaroslava Kretschmarová, Zdenek Sverák. Screenplay: Vera Chytilová, Josef Silhavy. Cinematography: Ivan Slapeta. Production design: Bohumil Pokorny. Film editing: Jirí Brozek. Music: Laco Deczi. 

Vera Chytilová's Calamity is a loosey-goosey comedy about the misadventures of Honza Dostál (Bolek Polívka), a college dropout who has decided he wants to drive a train. And so he does eventually, while dealing with the advances of several young women. The lanky but agreeable Honza is nobody's idea of a hunk, but perhaps there was a shortage of available young men in 1980s Czechoslovakia. Eventually, the film stops being a collection of occasionally funny incidents and focuses on the titular calamity: The train Honza is driving gets buried in snow, and the movie centers on the reactions of the passengers, including several of his girlfriends, to their predicament. Chytilová, whose career had suffered after the Soviets cracked down on sassy Czech filmmakers, manages to insert some sly digs at the government bureaucracy but they lack the bite of her earlier films. It's a benign, amusing movie with one or two laugh-out-loud moments. 

Daisies (Vera Chytilová, 1966)

Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová in Daisies

Cast: Jitka Cerhová, Ivana Karvanová, Julius Albert, Jan Klusák, Marie Cesková, Jirina Myskova, Marcela Brezinová, Oldrich Hora, Václav Chochola, Josef Konicek, Jaromir Vornácka. Screenplay: Vera Chytilová. Ester Krumbachová, Pavel Jurácek. Cinematography: Jaroslav Kucera. Production design: Karel Lier. Film editing: Miroslav Hájek. Music: Jirí Slitr, Jirí Sust.

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.