79/100
Second viewing, last seen in 2010 at the Silent Movie Theatre, which was then called Cinefamily and is now apparently showing films as Brain Dead Studios (pointlessly misleading name for an L.A. theater, if you ask me). And it's possible that seeing it with an audibly appreciative audience made a difference, as my original rating was 83; this time, watching at home alone, I was still frequently dazzled but also, at times, a bit exhausted, uncertain about whether plotless anarchic attitude can really sustain even a movie that's this short. To call Chytilová's sensibility Python-esque would be a stretch (certainly it'd strictly be the Palin-Jones axis, plus some Gilliam; there's none of Cleese-Chapman or Idle's verbal dexterity), but I nonetheless found myself thinking about how Python, after one greatest-hits Flying Circus rehash, abandoned that show's free-floating absurdist structure in favor of proper narratives, with even the sketch-based Meaning of Life featuring clear subdivisions rather than an apparently endless flow of nonsense. Daisies' various episodes don't quite qualify as sketches, but the film does violently lurch (in the film-grammatical sense) from bit to bit, creating a sense of randomness that's antithetical to our understanding of how feature-length movies work. I'm particularly fond of Chytilová's occasional match cuts that actually violate continuity, so that e.g. Marie I will slap Marie II out of frame to the left in a black-and-white urban setting and Marie II then lands in a field of daisies, the film having abruptly exploded into full color. Or there's another instance that involves one Marie grabbing the other's ankle and spinning her so that she falls into a chair at another location entirely, the cut on movement so casually perfect—executed like standard coverage, not as a "magic trick" calling attention to itself—that it's genuinely disconcerting when you realize the background has changed. Thing is, even if you know that Daisies runs a mere 76 minutes, the absence of conventional structural markers instills anxiety that maybe the movie will just keep arbitrarily mutating like this forever. Which is entirely in keeping with its fuck-you ethos, but I sometimes felt restless nonetheless.
Scarcely a problem, though, since there's abundant rambunctious moment-to-moment energy. "Crazily inventive portrait of restless, destructive youth plays like Ghost World as made by '60s Godard," I tweeted in 2010, and certain aspects of Chytilová's formal playfulness—particularly the constant shifts not just between monochrome and color but among various colored filters, often via jump cuts—definitely do feel Godard-influenced. Others, however, feel specifically Czech (which mostly means that I don't know the possible progenitors but do recognize that Švankmajer saw this picture). I don't know that Brakhage himself ever equaled the brief, astonishing collage sequence that follows the Maries cutting each other's limbs and heads off with scissors—that's a moderately amusing special effect, but Chytilová subsequently transforms a shot of them jumping around on the bed into the craziest damn thing I've ever seen, I assume by literally cutting each frame into over a hundred small irregular jigsaw-puzzle-style pieces and then reassembling it almost not quite correctly, 32 slightly different ways per second. (If that's not how it was done, please let me know.) Really just a modest visual exaggeration of what the two non-professional leads, Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová, have been doing throughout the entire movie. I get why Ghost World occurred to me, couple of disaffected young women, but there's a big difference between sneering and smashing; the Maries are beholden to neither societal nor cinematic dictates, doing whatever the fuck they feel like whenever the fuck they feel like it. They are, for lack of a better word, and decidedly not in the revised XCX definition, brats. Chytilová reportedly intended their doll-like, infantile nature as pointed commentary on various misogynistic depictions, but to me (and seemingly many others) it comes across as much more liberating than that. Which might actually still say something cogent about gender—I don't know that Daisies would work with two young men, both named Mark, similarly going ham on disruption for its own sake (can't even think of an analogue for the Maries fleecing middle-aged men for free meals and then abandoning them on trains)—but there's never a point in Daisies when I'm repelled by the shallow, selfish behavior on display, or even perceive it as criticism. The entire film's an act of cheerful defiance, albeit one that potently concludes with creepy, disturbing penitence and a sarcastically angry dedication aimed at the complacent. Hard to make "fuck everything" compelling for over an hour, but Head pulled it off, and so does Daisies.