Welcome to my new short series called Hippie Hotties where I plan to talk about a hippie-era movie that stretched the limits of free love and sex by showing off some sexy nudes on the big screen. This era of experimentation led to some pretty far-out films, so let's take a look!
For today's Hippie Hotties we are traveling across the globe to Czechoslavakia in 1966 to take a look at their interpretation of the counter culture scene. Let's take a look at the absolutely delightful Czech cult classic Daisies from the only female Czech New Wave film director, Vera Chytilova.
If you're a film snob in any way, then you've likely heard of Daisies. Or you have at least seen many of the iconic images from the movie which include the beautiful Ivana Karbanová covering her breasts with butterfly pictures while wearing a daisy crown in her hair. Or the two leading ladies' disembodied heads floating around their apartment. Or the girls bouncing up and down in a field of flowers while wearing mini dresses. This movie is extremely visual, filled with trippy imagery that has lead to the film's continued reverence among art students and lovers around the world. While other hippie movies use those kinds of visuals to recreate drug trips (or they appear to have been influenced by them), this movie's visuals all feel incredibly playful and they serve to take us along for the joyful and chaotic ride that we go on in this movie.
The plot of Daisies is as follows: Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová are two young friends named Marie I and Marie II. The Maries decide that they are bored of life and they want to live as though they are spoiled rich girls. You and me both, sisters. The problem is that the Maries are not actually rich girls, so they achieve this lovely dream of theirs by pulling pranks on people throughout Prague. From tricking men to take them out to elaborate meals to robbing an old lady, the girls cause unbelievable amounts of chaos in pursuit of their own entertainment. Their pursuit also gives us a lot of entertainment! They bathe together, they hang out in their bikinis together, and they roll around in bed together like sexy schoolgirls. They make being bad look like so much fun!
Its celebration of youth - and its 1960s style - definitely make it a hot hippie movie even though Prague is a long way away from Haight-Ashbury. Like a lot of hippie movies, it does come with warnings about greed and corruption but it does all of that in a surrealist way. Luckily, the women in the movie are not greedy about wearing clothes either as they spend so much of the movie in their undies or their bikinis. While Daisies celebrates the creative chaos that the two young women participate in, it also shows the ways in which they have to deal with their consequences and how none of these things really help their lot in life. In the end, they realize that none of what they did really mattered, but they had fun doing it! Trust me when I say that you'll have fun watching them do it, too.
It's important to remember that this is an area of the world that had just come out of the horrors of World War II and was now occupied by the Soviets. That is a lot of tension for one tiny country to take! Naturally, the art in this time period depicts the existential feelings that the nation's artists were going through. The filmmakers and artists in the Czech New Wave celebrated social freedoms that they were pushing for and critiqued restrictive politics through these charming movies that used humor and wild imagery to drive their points home. That's why so many of these movies feel rebellious! While the American hippie movies tended to focus on drugs, sex, and the Vietnam War; the Czech hippie movies were coming out of darker horrors and using light and humor to experiment with dissonance on screen. The results are stunning, especially in the colorful comedy Daisies.
Daisies did cause some controversy and it was briefly banned by the government. The communist MP Jaroslav Pruzinec said the film "depicted the wanton" and it was then pulled from major movie houses despite its rave reviews around Europe. That's pretty ironic considering Chytilova said that she initially intended this movie to be a satire of needless bourgeois decadence, but she ultimately was in trouble for showing so much food waste. Seriously! That was the "wanton" depiction that the government had a problem with: the numerous food fight scenes and eating scenes that the girls have. At the time, there was a national food shortage which a lot of the public blamed the government for, so the government was not too happy about whatever they believed the food fight scenes were trying to say. And here I thought the girls were just having fun throwing cake at each other!
Director Chytilova said the movie is a "necrologue about a negative way of life" which is honestly pretty clear when you watch the movie. Sure, there is no straightforward narrative, but that underlying feeling in this playful movie generally comes through. It's a shame that the Czech government at the time seemed to lack a sense of humor. Here is a small portion of the long and wild food fight scene, courtesy of the Criterion Collection:
This movie is part of the Czechoslovakian New Wave movement in the 1960s and is generally regarded as THE movie to come out of that movement (Milos Forman is another notable director who came out of the movement with his very sexy movies Loves of a Blonde and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders). The movie itself is very surreal and its structure appears to be as chaotic as the women in the movie, using slapstick humor and switching from color to black-and-white and using different colored filters at random.
For as lauded as this movie was, Vera Chytilova struggled to work in the Soviet-controlled film industry - especially considering how vocally critical she was of the government. Yeahhhh, they don't love it when you do that. Because of this and of her refusal to leave her home country, she only made a few films during the Soviet occupation. Imagine what could have been had she had more freedom to do the kind of work she wanted! It's all a little ironic, too, to think about the upset over this very silly movie. The film also ends with this dedication: "dedicated to those who get upset only over a stomped-upon bed of lettuce." It's crazy to think that this movie was briefly stifled for exactly that reason.
You can find Daisies on the Criterion Collection, but you can find its sexiest scenes right here:
