Film Review: Daisies

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 23 August 2010 04:59

Written by William Heidbreder

Daisies
by Vera Chitylova
Czechoslovakia, 1966
(Facets Multimedia/DVD)

Most Eastern European films from the Communist period are in some way political. Indeed, arguably the most instructive body of criticism of Stalinism to be found is in the cinema of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. In Czechoslovakia most of the relevant films were made between 1963-69, the period of the Czech New Wave. Daisies is a central exemplar.
    
Whether or not this is the greatest Czech film -- and it might be -- it is undoubtedly the most fun. Indeed, it is almost intolerably exuberant and delightful. One of the key European films of the ‘60’s, Daisies focuses on two young girls who share an apartment, both named Marie (perfectly played by Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová, who appear only in a handful of Czech films from the period).

The girls’ premise is that since the world has gone “bad” they too will be “bad”. In a series of vignettes (the film has no real plot), they proceed to make fun of everyone and everything in their world. They arrange dinner dates with older men who take the train into the city in order to meet them. They then ridicule these invariably sentimental, well-heeled gentlemen (we can infer their class status as Party members from the fact that they can afford to dine in expensive restaurants) while gorging themselves on food.

Food is everywhere in the film, up to the final vignette where the women ruin the prepared food in an empty banquet hall and then “make good” by piecing together broken plates and glasses in a mock clean-up. At this point, their party ends in a crashing chandelier that segues into nuclear explosions, followed by the filmmaker’s dedication “to all those whose sole source of indignation is a messed-up trifle.”  
    
The watchwords of the film are play, consumption, and artifice. The two women do nothing but play — with food, with magazine cutouts, with words and names. They have covered the walls of their apartment with drawings, cutouts, and writing. Food is central because they belong to the nascent world that French critics of the time called la société de consommation, consumer society.

This being a film from Communist Czechoslovakia and not Gaullist France, this world is not so much critiqued as used as a subversive weapon. A society of plentiful consumer goods and enough food to waste without flinching was not what the people of Eastern Europe had but what many of them wanted, and would finally get 20 years later. (The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia did flinch, and precisely at the food wastage, when apparatchiks saw the film, unwittingly making themselves targets of the witticism of the film’s prescient dedication).

What the young women in the film, and the young woman who made it, were taking aim at was a society based on a philosophy that was by turns utopian and tragic and not particularly comic, a society that took itself incredibly seriously. The music drives this home; much of it is bombastic or solemn, quasi-hymnal, and ironically counterpointed by the brilliant images and dialogue.

The work demonstrates how play, consumption, and artifice can be subversive strategies, more so in the Czech context than they would have been if this film had been made in the West, where much the same situations and behavior would have taken on a rather different meaning.
     
Indeed, Daisies was championed in the '70s by Western feminist critics, who saw the women in the film as role models for a playfully ironic and subversive critique or “deconstruction” of patriarchy. Chitylova herself took pains to disavow this interpretation, but it is easy to see both what fueled it and why it must have been in error.

Although the filmmaker said she originally considered using men, it is obvious that the film works much better with young women. In a patriarchal society — and despite its greater gender equality Communism was surely that — women, especially young women, have the privilege of being allowed a far greater measure of irresponsibility, because less is expected of them.

The problem is that this limits as much as it enables the political effectiveness of the appropriation of this irresponsibility through a strategy of playful irony. I’m not sure that the film escapes this limitation by virtue of a distance between the discourse of the characters and that of the film itself, because to speak of such a distance is to speak of irony, and the characters as well as the filmmaker are thoroughgoing ironists. That is, what is it to speak of an ironic treatment of characters whose discourse itself is entirely ironical?   

The film is very self-consciously a work of filmic artifice. But then the characters themselves seem to know that they are artificial, which is part of the meaning of their use of Cartesian doubt (wondering whether they exist, and at one point poignantly noting that not having a job and an identity card renders this problematic), and of their cutting off each other’s limbs and heads with scissors, along with mock screams, which is another manifestation of their refusal to take anything seriously, at least until the final chandelier crash.

The problem with the feminist reading and the strategy it implies is the failure to recognize that this kind of playful irony can be very effective in a work of fiction but is less so in real life. The film’s relentless attack on the new party bourgeoisie and its spirit of seriousness is quite potent. The feminists differed from the filmmaker in tacitly proposing that people, or women at any rate, live this way.  

A less innocent strategy is to propose instead that people learn to view as farce the life of a society whose ideology is that of a straight man. The Party didn’t laugh at the film or at the mess it had created in real life, but maybe it ought to have; it was Marx himself who said that tragic events return as farce.
    
I don’t wish to imply that the film ceases to delight when the Stalinist frame of reference is disregarded. Part of the fate of the spirit of 1968, which this film so well embodies, is that the kind of attitude that is here celebrated easily morphs into a kind of cynicism, which is indeed what the societé de consommation has become in the West. But the film delights on repeated viewings because it manages in some way I don’t fully grasp to steer clear of that.

The film’s somewhat Dadaist celebration of rebellion represents the eternal youth of a nascent consumer capitalism, a mythical time we all would like to remember when a ludic rage freed us of all responsibilities, when the use of play, consumption, and artifice felt like joyful liberation rather than some kind of compulsive ritual where people have to pretend to be happy.
    
(Available on DVD from Facets Multimedia, and on Amazon.com and Netflix. Amazon inexplicably has it packaged with Jill Godmilow’s Waiting for the Moon, a film about a famous lesbian couple, the writer Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas).

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