1. Daisies: Flower girls / Vera Chytilová / Czechoslovakia/
1966 / Comedy and Dramatic Film:
Storyline
(Plot Summary): The story follows two teenage girls, both named Marie, played by Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová,
who engage in strange pranks. The first scene shows the two main characters
sitting in bathing suits. Their conversation is robotic/mechanical; and from
that point on they decide to be bad. The next scene shows Marie 1 and Marie 2 dancing in front of a tree. The tree has many
fruits and resembles good and evil. Once Marie
2 eats from the tree, they both fall and appear in their apartment. There
is significant action here, with Marie 1
looking through the window at a parade and Marie
2 eating. The next few scenes are all similar. They show the two girls on a
date with an older man, a “sugar daddy”. Marie
2 eats voraciously and Marie 1
eventually starts acting like her, eating a lot of food. Marie 2 also goes to the apartment of a man who is a butterfly
collector. In this scene, there are a lot of butterflies shown as still frames.
At the end, she says that she wants to eat. Later on, they go to a factory. There
are still frames of locks, and the building looks run down. They look for
"nourishment" and stumble upon a feast presumably set out for
communist leaders. They eat the food, make a mess and destroy the room. It then
cuts to them being dunked in water like witches. They decide to go back and
make everything right again, and at the end a giant chandelier crushes them.
Direction: I love the work that Vera Chytilová did
during the process of shooting this film. To tell the actresses how they had to
behave and what they needed to do; it was marvelous, this is a great example of
a movie well done, because people talks about it after seeing, either if is for
good reasons or not. Within the direction, Vera chose to lead the audience to
have their own conclusions, without much or further explanations about what was
going on and how things developed along the story of the movie.
Acting: Aaaahhh! I loved this part! I seriously think that Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová
did a great job and got into character, this characters being spoiled and just
nonsense, making “a fool of themselves”, but in a very clever way and following
what Vera wanted from them. They
enhance the characters in a very well specific and unforgettable way, when they
start eating without control for example, or when, in the last part, they
decide they want to be good girls and clean all the disaster they made… Or when
they’re walking with “apricots” on the street and say “Nobody is paying attention to us”. It was just amazing the way they
played their roles.
Camera: I love the continuity of the angles in every
frame! Also noticed that they play with several angles: Over-the-Shoulder,
long-shot, close-up, point-of-view, wide angle, American plane, medium shot, still
frames, and much more…
This allows the audience to have a wide variety
of camera angles, being able to truly understand the meaning of the story on
different ways and perspectives.
Editing: For the edition part, I think the shots were amazingly
well done as well as of the decision of each frame. Even sometimes, when they
gave us more than needed, they did a great job; that was also part of the
sequence they were planning and the execution of having more symbolic aspects
about the social and political movements, and all of what was going on during
that time. I think all the sequence where in perfect order for me, especially
in the part where Marie 1 and Marie 2 are both in the apartment and
they start playing with the scissors and they show how they cut each other’s
body parts, like the head or arms or legs or so… Even when they are sitting in
their bathing suits in one scene and they appear in another place right away
and so suddenly. I think is all full of colorful experiments, dazzling collage
effects and surrealist antics.
Sound: The sound needed a little more of high
quality for my opinion; but then again, we are talking about the late 1960s, so
actually the sound is really accurate for the movie’s time and it release. I
liked the sound effects they put when the “daisies”
get on the train and then off it, also when they’re eating all the food from
the feast, smashing and crashing everything in there.
Music: Some of the music elements that can be found
in Daisies are somehow happy melodies
(like when they’re dancing around the tree) or “soldiers marching” like if they
were getting ready for war (this at the beginning for example)… For the rest of
it, they don’t really have distracting music that can keep your attention away
from the movie itself, so it really goes along with the images you’re watching
for you to concentrate in the totality of the movie and its meaning.
Did
you like/Dislike this Film? Why?
I never thought I’d love a 1960s movie before
(or at least not like this), but I have to say that this one just blew my mind
away. I loved the story itself as well as most of the cinematography and
composition of the frames. It’s an extremely “odd” movie and totally
unpredictable. The girls can be doing one thing in one scene and then appear
doing something totally different in the other. I love the fact that they
“don’t care about what people might think or say about them”, also, at the
beginning, you can see (in the initial credits), how they combine elements of
the movie itself with shots of the war and political movements that were
occurring at the moment, it was simply amazing… Confusing some times, but from
what I’ve learned, after watching a movie, if you talk about whether it is good
or bad, it means the director did a good job.
What
other films does it remind you of and why?
Even when one has nothing to do with the
other, in certain way, the first movie that came into my mind while watching “Daisies” was “The Sound of Music”, and this because of one of the Marie’s hair
cut that resemblance Frolain Maria at
the movie… I cannot think in another rather than this movie, also because of
the smooth transitions of one frame into another, even when the edition is
completely different; somehow this movie reminded me that other one.
What,
if any, is the statement or intent of this film?
It is clear that the girls say a lot about
Czechoslovakia’s society at that moment, all the political movements that
occurred, like when Maria 1 says “If you lie, that’s nothing… Everybody does
that… No one can tell” that made me think about how things were at that
time, inside the government, how the politics where manipulating people and
treating everything as if they didn’t care.
<< “This was apparently too much for
the Communist government. One petition from a member of the country’s National
Assembly read, “We ask these cultural workers: How long will they poison the
life of working people?” “Daisies” was banned from theaters and export.
After a few minutes of the film’s free,
unpredictable energy you see what made people nervous. The two young women turn
a food-filled banquet table into a catwalk, prank older male suitors on
humiliating dates, and get drunk at a nightclub and upstage its performers.
They lounge half-dressed in their green-accented flat, the walls covered with
phone numbers and flower engravings, munching on pickles and sparring playfully
in singsong tones. Their creativity and destructiveness are “two sides of the
same coin,” Ms. Chytilová said in an interview during the 2002 Prague on Film
Festival in London. The twinned heroines — one blonde and laureled like a
nymph, the other a taller brunette — act like dolls run amok, but they’re also
impish adolescents tweaking society through their experiments in
self-definition. “We can try anything once,” they exclaim in their existential
repartee”. >>
(“An
Audience For Free Spirits In a Closed Society”. July 1st, 2012. AR10 of the New
York edition)
How
do the various cinematic elements enhance the story or its intent?
I think everything was well composed in order
to create this master piece. All the cinematic elements and the aesthetical
compositions of each frame arranged an essential and well-done point of view
for any filmmaker. The lighting, the depth, lines, contour, contrast,
repetition, settings, camera movement, direction, actors, technical aspects;
even the script itself! They all formed a powerful balance connection between
one and another to work together in the creation of this magnificent movie. I
really, not only enjoyed it, but also loved it! Along with some “oldies”, this
is one of my very favorites! Women empower! J
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