Marie I: Everything is spoiled.
Marie II: Everything.
Marie I: So we should be spoiled too.
Marie II: Obviously.
Marie I: That’s how it starts. That’s how the film starts. We’re sitting in swimsuits. Our bodies move like hinges. Like puppets. Click, click, click. And one of us says everything is spoiled, and the other agrees, and then we decide to be bad.
Marie II: Not bad. Spoiled. There’s a difference.
Marie I: Is there?
Marie II: Bad implies guilt. Spoiled implies that someone else ruined you first. We didn’t ruin ourselves. The world did that. We’re just… completing the process.
Marie I: That’s very philosophical for a girl who’s about to eat an entire cake with her hands.
Marie II: I contain multitudes. Also butter cream.
Marie I: Should we tell them what happens in the film?
Marie II: What happens in the film?
Marie I: That’s the problem, isn’t it. Nothing happens. Everything happens. We eat. We destroy things. We trick old men into buying us dinner and then we leave before dessert. No wait, we stay for dessert. We always stay for dessert.
Marie II: We cut things with scissors.
Marie I: We cut a lot of things with scissors.
Marie II: Pickles. Sausages. Bananas. Eggs.
Marie I: You’re going to make them think it’s a metaphor.
Marie II: It is a metaphor.
Marie I: It’s also just us cutting pickles with scissors because it’s funny.
Marie II: It can be both.
Marie I: That’s the whole film, really. It can be both. It’s feminist and it’s silly. It’s political and it’s nonsense. It’s protest and it’s play. People keep trying to make us one thing. We refuse.
Marie II: Tell them about Věra.
Marie I: Věra Chytilová. Our director. Our mother. Our co-conspirator. She was the only major female filmmaker of the Czech New Wave. Do you know what that means? It means she was in a room full of men who were all making important films about important things, and she made a film about two girls destroying a banquet.
Marie II: The men made films about politics and alienation and the meaning of life.
Marie I: Věra made a film about two girls who eat too much and laugh too loud and refuse to explain themselves. And it turned out to be more dangerous than any of theirs.
Marie II: They banned us.
Marie I: They banned us! The Czechoslovak government. They said we were “depicting the wanton.” They said we wasted food. They were offended by the food.
Marie II: Not by the destruction of patriarchal norms.
Marie I: No. By the lettuce.
Marie II: There’s a title card at the end. Tell them about the title card.
Marie I: “This film is dedicated to those who get upset only over a stomped-upon bed of lettuce.”
Marie II: Věra was meaner than both of us combined.
Marie I: What does the film look like?
Marie II: Like nothing. Like everything. She changes the colour every few minutes. Tinted yellow. Tinted green. Tinted red. Sometimes the film is in colour. Sometimes it’s in black and white. Sometimes it’s both at the same time, like she couldn’t decide and chose not to decide.
Marie I: There are collages. Bits of footage pasted on top of other footage. Butterflies appear. Flowers appear. Things are spliced together that have no business being in the same frame.
Marie II: It looks like a scrapbook made by someone who is very talented and very angry and has access to a film laboratory.
Marie I: It’s 1966. The French New Wave is happening. Godard is making jump cuts and everyone thinks he’s a genius. Věra looks at what Godard is doing and says, that’s cute, watch this. And then she cuts the film apart and reassembles it like a ransom note.
Marie II: Godard broke the rules. Věra ate the rules and didn’t even burp.
Marie II: The old men.
Marie I: Yes. The old men. We find them. They’re always the same type. Polite. Wealthy. Eager. They think they’re taking us to dinner. They think they know how the evening will end.
Marie II: It ends with us eating everything on the table.
Marie I: Everything. Bread. Meat. Cake. Wine. We eat like we’re being paid for it. We eat like eating is a form of revenge. The men watch us. They can’t believe it. They expected delicacy. They expected gratitude. They got appetite.
Marie II: And then we leave.
Marie I: And then we leave. Sometimes mid-sentence. Sometimes mid-bite. We vanish. And the old men sit there, at their expensive tables, in their expensive restaurants, alone with the bill and the wreckage and the dawning realization that they were never in control of anything.
Marie II: Feminist cinema in 1966, everyone.
Marie I: Before most people had a word for it.
Marie I: The banquet scene.
Marie II: The banquet scene.
Marie I: Near the end. We find a room. A massive table. Laid out for some kind of official function. Crystal glasses. White tablecloths. Food piled high. Nobody is there. It’s waiting for important people.
Marie II: We are not important people.
Marie I: We destroy it. We eat. We throw food. We swing from the chandelier. We smash plates. We roll across the table. The tablecloth rips. The glasses shatter. It’s beautiful. It’s horrible. It goes on and on and on.
Marie II: People call it the most anarchic scene in cinema.
Marie I: It might be. It might also be the most honest. Because every banquet in history was prepared by people who weren’t invited to sit at the table. And every time you see a table laid out for someone else, some part of you wants to do exactly what we did.
Marie II: We just did it.
Marie I: We just did it.
Marie II: And then we try to fix it.
Marie I: That’s the part nobody expects. After we destroy the banquet, we feel guilty. Or something like guilt. Or something that looks like guilt but might just be boredom. We try to put the table back together. We pick up the plates. We smooth the tablecloth. We arrange the food.
Marie II: It doesn’t work.
Marie I: Of course it doesn’t work. You can’t un-break a glass. You can’t un-eat a cake. You can’t un-destroy the thing you’ve destroyed. That’s the whole point. Destruction is irreversible. Revolution is irreversible. Spoiling is irreversible. Once you’ve decided that everything is ruined, you can’t go back to pretending it isn’t.
Marie II: And then the ceiling falls on us.
Marie I: And then the ceiling falls on us.
Marie II: Are we dead?
Marie I: I don’t know. The film ends. We’re under the rubble. The dedication card appears. The film was seventy-six minutes long.
Marie II: Seventy-six minutes. We destroyed patriarchy, bourgeois dining culture, cinematic convention, and a really nice chandelier in seventy-six minutes.
Marie I: Are we a feminist film?
Marie II: We’re a film made by a woman, about women, that was banned by men. You tell me.
Marie I: Are we a political film?
Marie II: We’re a film that made a government so angry they outlawed it because we wasted food. You tell me.
Marie I: Are we a peculiar film?
Marie II: We’re two girls named Marie who decided the world was broken and responded by breaking everything else. We cut sausages with scissors. We ate with our hands. We laughed when we shouldn’t have. We were loud when we should have been quiet. We refused to make sense. We refused to apologize. We refused to be one thing.
Marie I: So yes.
Marie II: So yes.
Daisies (Sedmikrásky) Directed by Věra Chytilová Czechoslovakia, 1966 | 76 minutes
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