Of all the many films making their stateside premiere at the festival, one drew an outsized share of both attention and confusion: Daisies, a riotous satire directed and co-written by Věra Chytilová. Starring Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová—neither of whom were professional actresses at the time of production—the story follows two young women, both named Marie, who gleefully provoke everyone they encounter across their stuffy hometown, turning their rebellious behavior into performance art. Throughout Daisies’ swift running time, the Maries invade a rigid nightclub, destroy a lavish dinner banquet and humiliate a series of baffled older men. Such vignettes are related through a series of jarringly edited sequences, some in gorgeously tinted hyper-color, others in stark black-and-white; they’re bookended—hauntingly—by grainy real-life combat footage from World War II (at the time a not-too-distant memory across Europe).
To many viewers who caught Daisies in its initial run, the film was a confounding novelty. But 60 years later, the elements that once made it so incomprehensible—its akimbo rhythms, its jam-the-torpedoes imagery—are now part of the 21st-century lingua franca. And for moviegoers reared by the speedy visuals of the digital era, the film’s frenetic pace, abrupt editing style and antiwar messaging all make perfect sense—even when the movie makes no sense at all. In its defiance of conventional narrative structure, Daisies reflects the sort of dizzyingly randomized, hypermetabolic self-expression that now dominates the internet. It turns out the Maries were decades ahead of their time.
“To watch Daisies is the cinematic equivalent of stumbling into someone else’s dream,” writes Gigi. ”It’s like a deconstruction of cinema itself, the abolition of any kind of logical and grammatical rules, reflecting in movie form the political and human meaningless existence.” In other words, as Brianna declares in a five-star rave: “At no point did I know what was going on here.”
