Flowers at Large

Two girls go on a rampage in Prague in 1966's Daisies (Sedmikrásky). Like other films of the Czech New Wave, it's a combination of satire, surrealism, and iconoclasm, though it's a bit more surreal than others. At its best, Daisies is a gleeful romp, though its mania wears a little thin at times. Director Vera Chytilova was wise to keep it short, the film's total runtime being only an hour and sixteen minutes.

Many critics have been at pains to classify this as an anti-patriarchal film but I'm not convinced. Wikipedia quotes a writer named Ela Bittencourt as saying the film uses "the stereotype of how women are often infantilized and as a weapon." I don't get the sense the patriarchy typically aims to portray women as people who smash table settings and have food fights. Another critic, Anca Parvulescu, seems a little closer to the mark when she says the film is "an attack on manners." I could see the film as feminist insofar as it has women doing things women don't normally get to do in movies but not really anti-patriarchal. The patriarchy itself isn't particularly represented in the film so it's hard to see the main characters as being in opposition to it.

One critical comment I thought was insightful comes from New Zealander critic Carmen Gray who said that under "totalitarian oppression, clearing one's own mind can be a radical act of deprogramming." Having observed the oppressive rules of etiquette in Japan I can easily appreciate how the girls' rebellion against the idea of certain behaviours invariably having the same significance is liberating. From my first days in Japanese schools, I was amazed at how thoroughly the students were conditioned to function within a strict and limited vocabulary of mannerisms. The bullies would laugh like cartoon villains, a sort of thing I'm accustomed to taking as silly but in recent years it's become absurdly serious and used as a tool to manipulate people into conformity with the threat of embarrassment. So I can easily see how these two girls romping around town and blithely deploying symbols without meaning was seen as a strike against the Communist establishment.

The cinematography by Jaroslav Kucera is maybe the most remarkable aspect of the film, being at turns beautiful and fascinating. In one remarkable scene, the girls playfully attack each other with scissors and film trickery is used to make them appear to be cavorting headless and armless before the image itself becomes divided into shivering jigsaw pieces.

Daisies is available on The Criterion Channel.