Country: Czechoslovakia
Director: Věra Chytilová
Time: 1 hour and 16 minutes
What It Elicits: Ponderous thoughts on lust and gluttony, light, and staging
Where Can I Get It: Criterion (w/subscription) or BFI Player (w/subscription)
What is Věra Chytilová’s Daisies about? I don’t know. But I think it’s about something, which feels different from watching a film which wants to be about something (but which can’t crystallize its conception in any meaningful way). Daisies knows what it’s about. I’m just not sure I do. That’s to say: There are films that haven’t articulated a vision because their initial idea or conceit couldn’t withstand the strictures and duration of a full-length feature. Then, there are films, some of which like Daisies are slow films with long shots and limited plot, entraced by light and dismissive of dialogue, to which you could, if you found yourself so inclined, critique using fancy words like: nascent, burgeoning, inchoate. Essentially, you’d be arguing a film had some seed of interest but, for whatever reason, its director couldn’t facilitate the transition from seed to...flower? (I suppose this is why people say “inchoate,” because you can at least avoid the eye rolls of hackneyed metaphors.) But that’s not Daisies. Ostensibly, Daisies has all those things: a schematic plot (in which two young women lounge aimlessly or cause various forms of destruction, often revolving around their ability to bamboozle older men), characters only partially drawn and often incommunicado (the aforementioned young women). Yet Daisies remains a fully-fledged film, indeed a good film with an almost shocking final crescendo encompassing greed, wrath and gluttony. (The seven deadly sins might each be argued to make an appearance and, if you were so inclined, you might argue the film has something to do with that.)
It’s tempting to abstract from the characters and scenes, find archetypal resemblances, and construct meaning from those. Daisies remains so rich in images, startling and beautiful and ponderous—the long takes, indeed, force viewers into a consideration of scenic construction and the camera in ways which draw attention to the film’s being a film—think New Wave, to which this film is linked. The camera forces a close reading of each scene on its viewer. You might say, along with the comments made by Chytilová, that it depicts (and caustically critiques) a form of decadence and greed. You might add that this remains at odds with a socialist vision of human flourishing. I’m not so sure I buy this interpretation, not least because it feels a little too boilerplate. Yet, my distrust of that reading is in some sense even more elemental. The destruction and temptation embodied in its central characters remains itself attractive, playful, juvenile, unphilosophical. There is no sense of cynicism or instrumentality in the characters’ acting out. They want what they want. And, as a result, it’s hard to imbue them with the attributes needed to critique a cynical, thoughtful, and grasping “bourgeois decadence.” At base, they are too enticing as characters to be vehicles for unabashed critique. What’s Daisies about? I don’t know. But I think it’s worth pondering.
Go Down the Rabbit Hole With:
Milos Forman — The Firemen’s Ball (1967)
Věra Chytilová — The Inheritance of Fuckoffguysgoodday (1992)