The girls especially love toying with unsuspecting men. This dyad has a routine where Marie I will go out on a date with a guy seemingly interested in a sugar daddy-style arrangement; Marie II will crash it; then they dupe the man into buying them a feast before ditching him. In one of the movie’s funniest scenes, a young man drones over the phone about how in love he is with one of the Maries. His yearnings aren’t listened to; they become background noise for the girls as they absent-mindedly — albeit metaphorically — slice up sausages, bananas, and pickles. (There is so much eating in this movie — and the microphones are careful to amplify every bite, chew, swallow, and lip smack — that my roommate asked if I was watching an ASMR video when they briefly passed through the living room.) The Maries have as much of an appetite for a good meal as they do a memorable life. There’s no telling what will sate them. “One should try everything,” one Marie concludes.

Daisies’ presentation refracts the narrative’s lawlessness. Many scenes are washed over in a single color — a purple or an orange or a green, maybe — like a silent movie. (The film can at times evoke silent-era slapstick comedy — a period when screen-tinting was commonplace.) Images oftentimes look like they’re disintegrating. Jump cuts flourish. When montages transpire they jerk around, like roller-coasters. Partway through the movie, the girls decide to have some fun with scissors — and, in a meta twist, start cutting up the screen itself. Nothing is safe from their caprices — not even the medium through which Chytilová transmits their misadventures. Even if Daisies was purely an exercise in chaos-sowing and nothing else, it would still invigorate. Chytilová and her nonprofessional actresses make it seem like they’re having the most fun in the world, and I couldn’t help but get caught up in the excitement of what felt like a series of filmed dares. Seeing these women do whatever they want is itself a delight. Societal bounds are treated no differently than wallpaper: there, but unimportant to the action it envelops.  

But Chytilová’s aim isn’t exclusively sensory. The last thing we see in the movie is archival footage of explosions; then a title card takes over the screen. “Dedicated to those who get upset only over a stomped-upon bed of lettuce," it reads. 

The movie might seem, before this epilogue, like a condemnation of excess. After the girls try making amends for their bad behavior, it doesn’t matter: karma, ever-cruel, loves a bold entrance. But this last line tweaks their punishment’s implication. These girls might be wasteful, but who cares about relatively innocuous misbehaviors when there are larger systemic problems creating havoc on a bigger scale? (The movie was made under a totalitarian government, whose approval Chytilová had to get before even making the movie — more on that in a bit.) This coda gives Daisies a last-minute kick; it invigorates everything coming before it. The Maries’ determination to eschew social permissions becomes a political act — and its ultimate untenability only further proves it.  

Despite the governmental approval that preceded its release, Daisies was swiftly banned in its native Czechoslovakia shortly after its premiere. National Assembly member Jaroslav Pružinec famously denounced the film for flagrantly “depicting the wanton." A major sticking point was the open squandering of goods while the nation was literally going through a food shortage. Though Chytilová wasn’t exactly blacklisted from filmmaking, her ability to make another movie became fraught — even more so after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union. (Her follow-up to Daisies — 1969’s Fruit of Paradise — was immediately followed by a long, basically forced absence from feature directing.) She petitioned President Gustav Husak directly in 1975 to let her make another feature, and in 1976 she saw one of her biggest successes in The Apple Game. Even then, Chytilová’s career would still continue to be flecked with censorship trouble. Daisies was in several ways representative of the fundamental battle at the heart of her career: an eagerness to break barriers that was promptly undermined by said barriers. But what Chytilová managed to get away with is still plenty exhilarating.