Critics reviews

Despite how wildly influential the film was for me, I hadn't actually watched it in its entirety in over 15 years. I realized on this recent viewing that there might be another reason Daisies has been seeping back into my subconscious of late—every day in quarantine, you ask yourself, “Does it matter?” and most of the time, there's a nagging feeling that the answer is “No.”

Uncompromisingly modernist in its elliptical, fragmented structure and eschewal of realism, Daisies has not dated one iota: 50 years later, it remains startling, fearless, and utterly unclassifiable.

Rapid-fire montages of padlocks and pinned butterflies punctuate this mishegoss . . . Scenes in black and white switch to vivid Eastmancolor, another brazen deviation from standard film syntax. Though Daisies may have bloomed from the context of the Czech New Wave, its unruly ethos has reverberated through the subsequent decades. Watching it now, it's still unpredictable with its explosive burlesque of a narrative. It's still filthy and feminine and fun.

It wasn't only the best experience that I had all year, but maybe the best film that I saw in 2016 for the first time. There was a sensual appeal to seeing the colors and the performances in the small room, hearing the projector noisily advancing through the reels, but also about the film itself and how in my mind it instantly made me think of, above all, the New Waves of Cinema and their relation to the Industry of Cinema.

This is cinema at its most joyful and unfettered. Consider, for instance, the scene in Daisies in which a grey steel train track suddenly bursts with colour, its rails multiplying then merging again, its sleepers speeding away from the camera as if they were extras in a filmed futurist poem. Like so many of the beautiful moments in Daisies, it does not advance a narrative or argue a point – it is anarchy for its own sake.

There's no doubt Chytilová's deeply subversive work profoundly engaged with the intricacies of socialism... Daisies can be viewed as a critical conversation about the possibilities of politics, socialism, labour, feminism, love, sex and the relationship between genders within the conditions of socialism.

The playful, anything-goes experimentation of Daisies, with its psychedelic onslaught of coloured filters and fragmented editing, made it the most formally vibrant and daring film of the Czech New Wave.

Psychedelic sisterhood in the Eastern Bloc "like a message from another world," just about the most ticklish barrage of nihilism in cinema... The blur of Brecht and Sennett is similar to concurrent hellzapoppin' visions (The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film, Hallelujah the Hills, Zazie dans le Métro), yet Vera Chytilová's singular revue outdoes them by pushing its slapstick fragmentation beyond mere larkiness and towards an exhaustive dismantling of strictures both social and cinematic.

The Czech director Vera Chytilová's second feature, "Daisies," from 1966... is one of the great outpourings of cinematic invention in an age of over-all artistic liberation—and the revolutionary value of imagination is the film's very subject.

Věra Chytilová's films have earned her acolytes and enemies at an equal rate—particularly DAISIES, an anarchic, poetic, visually exhilarating film lacking in any affirmation whatsoever.

All manner of flora—along with Godardian color shifts, out-of-place sound effects, unexpected montages and anachronistic shooting styles—flourish in Daisies, a cherry bomb of Czech surrealism lobbed two years before the Prague Spring. Daisies remains a potent agit-freak-out—flower power laced with poison.

Matching the lunacy of her characters, the formal elements of Chytilová's movie also suggest liberating disorder. A riot of technical tricks, Daisies shifts between color, black-and-white, and tinted images and includes a scene in which the two Maries, wielding scissors, essentially turn themselves into paper dolls.