Daisies

Daisies (Sedmikrásky, 1966) is Věra Chytilová's avant-garde Czech comedy, available to watch online on iFILM. Two girls, both named Marie, decide that since the world has gone bad, they may as well go bad too. What follows is 74 minutes of gleeful sabotage.

They gorge themselves in fancy restaurants on other men's money, snip everything in sight with scissors, toy with their aging suitors and finally tear apart a laid-out banquet until the feast becomes a wreck. Chytilová cuts it all in jagged jumps, drenches frames in color filters, breaks the image into collage — black and white one second, dyed pink the next, the soundtrack falling apart. Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová don't play characters so much as two forces too bored to behave.

The film was banned in Czechoslovakia, officially for wasting food — though it was the freedom that scared the censors, not the broken plates. Today it stands among the key works of the Czech New Wave and sixties feminist cinema. Come for the rebellion, not the plot. Stream Daisies (1966) online on iFILM.