Daisies – Wellington Film Society

Vera Chytilová, Czechoslovakia1966, 74 mins DCP, M.

Daisies is a brightly colored surrealist comedy starring a couple of chicks in search of kicks. Spawned by the Prague Spring, the best friends undertake a quest to find a life different from their previously regimented patriarchal society.

Picking up men to fleece for fancy dinners, escaping sexual obligations by hopping trains, chatting up a man on the phone while roasting and cutting sausages in their room, the two are transgressive adventurers and inveterate consumers.

They must be seen to be believed: frenzied, obsessive, undaunted until a Boschian ending plunges them into the consequences of their actions. Chytilová made a visionary masterpiece that has always been ahead of its time: feminist for the seventies, punk performance for the eighties, postapocalyptic vision for the nineties, it deserves absolute celebration for its empowering invention of female buddies on the move. - B. Ruby Rich, BAMPFA