There’s a particular kind of thrill that comes from watching a film like Daisies, a kind of visual, emotional and ideological whiplash. It is almost psychedelic. What begins with two young giggly women deciding that “the world is bad, so we will be bad too,” quickly unfolds into a film that uses absurdity, disjointed editing, and visual experimentation to question social norms and narrative filmmaking.
Emerging from 1960s Czechoslovakia, Daisies was born in a time of mounting political pressure and flickers of cultural reform. Though this was the peak of liberalization within the Eastern Bloc, the Communist Party maintained strict control over artistic expression. While pop art was flourishing in the West, Czechoslovakia remained constrained by socialist realism. In this context, Daisies arrived like an explosion. Its rebellious style and anti-authoritarian tone scrambled expectations and terrified the regime. Like many radical works throughout art history, it was branded scandalous for challenging dominant ideologies. The film was swiftly banned, and Chytilová was barred from working until 1975.
The film’s experimental form is central to its politics. Scenes are stitched together with jump cuts, saturated color filters, animated overlays, and sudden shifts in tone or setting. Nothing is allowed to settle into realism. One moment we’re in sepia, the next in full saturated color. Locations change mid-scene, logic is bypassed entirely. This refusal of visual or narrative continuity is stylistic and is a form of structural resistance. Chytilová isn’t just making a story about disobedient women, she’s making a film that disobeys cinematic conventions.
The two protagonists drift through the film creating chaos: scamming meals out of older men, cutting up phallic food, destroying banquet tables, faking suicide. Their actions appear playful but are deliberate performances of disruption. The scene where they cut up phallic food, while also listening to a love confession from a man, really shows how they ridicule the men, the patriarchy. But it is not deliberate, it is a more genuine unbotheredness with the system. The excessive consumption, particularly of food, really stands out. During a time when scarcity was still fresh in collective memory, these characters are seen devouring and destroying food in grotesque displays. It’s a pointed gesture, unsettling and provocative. The message is that decadence itself is already built into the society they’re rebelling against. In Daisies, nothing is sacred: food, men, clothing, even war become objects of ridicule and rebellion.
Gender roles are at the core of the film. Daisies satirises femininity by exaggerating it. They have this doll-like behaviour. The girls giggle constantly, dress up in lingerie, act helpless or seductive depending on the moment. But their performance is so stylized and self-aware that it becomes a parody. At the start we enter the Garden of Eve where we see a single tree in the middle where the girls end up at, and we can almost connect that act of temptation or rather, rebelliousness, to the female representation in the film. These women are unapologetically selfish, impulsive and destructive. Their disobedience leads to a recursive spiral of collapse.
From the crackling of their bodies to a crashing down chandelier, the message is clear: wrongdoing doesn’t erupt all at once, it accumulates, hidden in the mundane, growing from small acts of defiance that spiral into chaos. The girls go beyond and above the constraints of the world, the world in which men have set the rules, making it a feminist portrayal with a female rebellion against that establishment. At the same time there is also a connection to the rebelliousness of the film itself. The way it’s montaged and shot, with random jump cuts inserted in between scenes, is also quite a rebellious act against normal filmmaking. As a side note, I have noticed that the biblical symbolism of the fruit is also upended: the fruit of temptation is not an apple but a peach, softer, more sensual, less moralistic. It’s a perfect emblem for their anarchic, flirtatious energy.
Chytilová plays with meaning through montage. In one sequence, the girls “cut off” pieces of each other’s bodies in a stylised and obviously fake act of violence. The resulting scene is closer to a collage or surrealist painting than a narrative beat. This also really extenuates the idea of them being doll-like as they can be literally cut up or disassembled into pieces. Elsewhere, they sit in silence for extended periods, or speak in circular, empty dialogue. Everything is symbolic but nothing is overly explained.
One of the most striking sequences is, of course, the banquet scene. The girls gorge themselves on an extravagant spread of food, dancing on tables, laughing, destroying everything in sight. It’s both playful and unsettling, exaggerated to the point of discomfort. When they attempt to put everything back together afterward, their failure to do so reads as a comment on irreversible damage be it personal, political or environmental. The final shot, where a chandelier collapses on them, offers no neat morals but functions as a visual punchline. The desire to “repair” destruction is just another layer of performance.
Daisies’ chaotic visual language isn’t a distraction from meaning, it is the meaning. Chytilová uses fragmentation, repetition and visual overload to mirror the absurdity of the world the characters are reacting to. That’s where its power lies. It doesn’t offer answers or redemption. It exposes systems, mocks them and invites the audience to look at the mess left behind.
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Love for film has always been a family thing - cozy evenings watching something we’re truly invested in, discovering new directors, and obsessively bingeing entire filmographies (latest fixation: Andrei Tarkovsky and Pedro Almodóvar). My parents introduced me to the world of cinema through Django Unchained and Apocalypse Now, that is when I realised what films can be…it’s a canon event. I studied Economics and Philosophy at the University of Manchester but squeezed in a year of Film Studies because, well… cinema. I love the way films make you feel and I definitely believe that we have different views hence different reviews. While cinematic masterpieces exist, the ones that truly matter are the ones that stay with you long after the credits roll. Beyond my TikTok and Instagram film pages, I lift, paint, play instruments, and (questionably) did ballet. Creativity shapes how I see film. Favourite 4: Back to the Future, Stalker, Poor Things, Spirited Away.