Repertory: Black and white in color

Czech director Vera Chytilova's 1966 masterpiece Daisies out in a fantastic restoration.

“You don’t belong to this century,” says the feverish, love-struck pianist with a thing for taxidermy. “Like a message from another world. 

“You’re so earthly, yet so heavenly.”

Vera Chytilova’s extraordinary Czech feature Daisies has always felt proudly out of time. 

Subversive, freewheeling and thoroughly underground, the movie is a sustained provocation—especially against the communist authorities who unwittingly subsidized it.

Made in 1966, during the Prague Spring and the creative ascension of the Czech New Wave, the work has always felt exuberant, original, sexy, fun and exhilarating.

It’s a riot of color, mood, form and dizzying patterns. I have been fortunate to see it multiple times, in various formats over the years. Now a beautifully restored version opens Friday theatrically in New York. 

(The film is also available to stream on the Criterion Channel.) Criterion is also issuing the film on Blu-Ray November 1.

The movie runs only about seven-five minutes. Working with very gifted screenwriter and costume designer Ester Krumbachova, Chytilova packs more into that fleeting running time than most movies twice its length.

It feels more like a Bresson film in that manner; every cut, moment, and gesture feels essential and necessary. Nothing is wasted or over-elaborated. 

It’s a deeply political and defiantly feminist work. The director’s former husband, Jaroslav Kucera, was the cinematographer. His work is also extraordinary, the subtle and radiant changes in tone, color, and framing providing a shape and ecstatic rhythm.

The two beguiling and ravishing lead actors, Ivana Karbonova and Jitka Cerhova, are spectacular as the insouciant and rule-breaking libertines at the center of the film.

Daisies is a collage of actions and movements, with repeated shifts in color and black and white, hallucinatory editing patterns and accelerated frame rates. Surreal and kinetic, the movie just floats and moves in a ruminative and free associative manner.

Both of the women characters are named Marie.

Slightly taller and more classically beautiful, Cerhova is a brunette with an elastic style and impervious manner. She uses her angular body beautifully, her wide, pouty mouth suggestive and annihilating. She has the iconoclastic screwball nature, sly, disruptive and cruelly funny.

The strawberry blonde Karbonova is more subversive and unpredictable. She tends to be more the foil. She is also more uninhibited with her body.

Neither performer had significant training, background and credits in acting before the movie. They were students. The lack of polish provides a naturalness and ease, especially in front of the camera.

The two have a kinetic rapport, a warmth and generosity that colors and shapes so much of their emotional byplay. They anticipate and play off each other, the vulnerability and vibrant personalities contrasting with their ebullient and intoxicating freedom, control and open styles.

“Since the world is bad,” Cerhova reasons at the start of the movie. So are we, she reasons. They proceed to spend the balance of the movie proving the point.

Cerhova sends a mock right slap across the face of her friend, plunging her down a rabbit hole, and marking the first of the many shifts from black and white to color.

During the second of a series of very funny and entertaining lunch dates where the women alternately seduce and humiliate their much older male companions, Chytilova deploys rapid changes in color stocks and filters, generously moving from sepia to chiaroscuro and intercut with greens and reds.

Framed by archival Second World War footage of bombings, destructions and aerial assaults, Daisies posits a wholly different kind of breakdown and disorder.

The destabilization of form and style is the dominant motif—the eruption of the narrative, the absence of plot, the sexual hostility and humiliation of the party members and cultural elite.

The movie simultaneously looks backward and forward, with references to Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), capturing the unmistakable influence of the French New Wave, especially Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1961).

Jacques Rivette returned the favor several years later, his extravagant and phantasmagorical Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) unmistakably a byproduct of the Chytilova film. (The remarkable physical resemblance of Cherhova and French actor Juliet Berto only deepens the connections between the two films.)

The movie is fleet, fast and sexy. The associative nature of the cutting and the juxtapositions allow for a succession of sublime pleasures. 

“Look a butterfly,” says one Marie, as it cuts beautifully from a black and white interior to a radiant portrait of the moon, and the verdant landscapes and natural light.

Water as a form of rebirth and sexual initiation is also prevalent throughout. Food as a substitute for sex. Again, part of the beauty and wonder of the film is the absence of overt analysis. It’s not necessary to try and decipher every meaning or moment and ferret their significance. 

Daisies is a movie meant to be viewed, taken in, and devoured.

The two women are beautiful and rapturous. For all the implied criticism of the state, what makes Daisies truly radical and feminist is how thoroughly these women control every facet of their own sexuality. 

The body is political (there is a very funny montage about how chagrined the women become at discovering the limits of their control and sexual attractiveness to the proletariat class).

Having said that, castration anxiety runs throughout the movie. Probably the most celebrated moment in the film is its most sexually subversive with the women’s arms, bodies and disembodied heads achieving a life all their own.

Both women are loose-limbed and wildly unpredictable. Karbonova has the more anarchic bent. She facilitates the great closing moment, an epic food fight in a beautifully ornate and well-appointed room that is sustained and wondrous.

Contentious to the very end—regardless of the career implications—Chytilova ends the film with the ultimate putdown, dedicating it to the reactionaries and apparatchiks whose “sole source of indignation is a trampled-on trifle.”

The movie had devastating and catastrophic implications for the people who made it. The Czech New Wave was one of the true film miracles of the mid to late sixties, extinguished by the Soviet invasion in August 1968. 

With the exception of Milos Forman, most of these gifted, defiant artists did not have an easier time of things liberated from the Iron Curtain.

From the Nazi occupation to communist takeover, the nearly five-decade history of what was called Czechoslovakia is ruinous and horrifying.

Daisies is a great film—sensual, enticing, exuberant. Seeing it again, in this beautiful restoration, it feels wholly justifiable tracing a through line from its creation to the wonder and excitement of the Velvet Revolution nearly twenty-five years later.

It’s that cathartic. 

Images of Vera Chytilova’s Daisies, courtesy of Janus Films. All rights reserved.

At top: Jitka Cerhova, left and Ivana Karbonova.