images, jumping from black-and-white to color at unexpected moments, and weaves in surreal montages where the girls consider everything from romance to death.
The two girls do not behave the way young ladies “should.” But the most controversial scene in Daisies actually involved a food fight. In the scene, the girls come across a rich banquet, which they happily destroy, wasting the decadent feast by throwing food at each other. It was this scene which led to the film being banned from playing in theaters, with the Czech Government citing food wastage as the reason for the decision. Appropriately, the film is dedicated “to those who get upset over a stomped-upon bed of lettuce.”
Daisies feels like a bold feminist statement, with the women deciding they do not need men to complete their lives and using male sexual advances to get free food. But though her work often told stories about women and provided new representations of them onscreen, it is important to note that throughout her career Věra Chytilová rejected the label of “feminist” being attached to her films. She saw herself as an individual making a statement about her country, not her gender.
After 1968, many filmmakers of the Czechoslovak New Wave were blacklisted. Věra Chytilová released Fruit of Paradise in 1970 and Kamaradi in 1971, but didn’t make another movie until the ban was lifted in 1976. Later, she turned to teaching, and found success with documentaries. Chytilová passed away in 2014 at the age of eighty-five and is remembered as a trailblazer for female filmmakers. She was an innovator and an uncompromising revolutionary artist and activist whose films dared to make a statement at a time when it was dangerous to do so.
The two girls act the opposite to how young ladies are “supposed” to behave. Using their beauty and youth, they wage a feminine war on society, destroying the very things they are meant to hold dear—food, money, home, work. The male characters in Daisies are reduced to sugar daddies who do whatever the girls want and often end up in tears.
•Věra Chytilová was never officially classified as a blacklisted director, but the government made it nearly impossible for her to find work within Czechoslovakia. Secretly, she directed commercials under her husband’s name, Jaroslav Kučera.
•In the mid-1970s, “Year of Women,” a US film festival, contacted Chytilová to get permission to screen Daisies. After she informed them that her government wouldn’t let her attend or even make films in her own country, the festival petitioned the government on her behalf. This international pressure, plus a letter Chytilová wrote directly to President Gustáv Husák, encouraged the government to ease the ban so she could resume work.
•Even her graduate film The Ceiling (1962) caused controversy. The movie was based on Chytilová’s experiences as a fashion model and focused on exploitation and materialism. After a screening, one audience member stood up and said her film “undermines people’s faith in socialism. If that is the way it really is, then none of it is worth it at all.”
•Chytilová married two cinematographers, Karel Ludwig and Jaroslav Kučera. Her two children with Kučera have followed in their footsteps and both work in the film industry—their daughter, Tereza Kucerová, is an actor and costume designer, and their son, Stepán Kučera, is a cinematographer.
Jenna Ipcar on The Heartbreak Kid (1972)
I’ve always felt stumped as to why we’re even allowed to talk about The Graduate without also mentioning Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid. Nichols and May had a past history as a comedic duo, and I’ve always felt that The Heartbreak Kid served as a more grounded and darkly comedic heightening of The Graduate. Under May’s expert direction, The Heartbreak Kid is a supremely sharp commentary on the wake of destruction left behind by the follies of selfish men.
The Heartbreak Kid essentially starts where The Graduate leaves off: with a man realizing that his wedding hasn’t fulfilled his spiritual desires, and therefore moving on to chase another whim. Lenny Cantrow is shown to be living purely on impulses, which have obvious repercussions that only he can’t seem to anticipate. Similar to Benjamin Braddock, the film also ends with Lenny having a realization that doesn’t extend beyond his own selfishness; he desires the chase more than the prize. While Nichols’ film gently flirts with a dreamy existentialism, May’s goes for some darkly realistic and fully grounded musings on male ego—taking the male fantasy of The Graduate and carrying it to its logical reality in The Heartbreak Kid.
May further flips The Graduate on its head by defining her main character primarily through the gaze of the supporting cast. It’s the expressions and reactions of the people around Lenny that clue us in on how shallow this pursuit of his romantic ideal actually is. Neil Simon’s script easily could have been a misogynistic (or questionably anti-Semitic) and boorish comedy about a man who tosses his nagging, confident Jewish wife, and obtains his ideal fantasy shiksa goddess through dogged persistence and enterprising bullshitting. Yet as the director, May pointedly makes the decision not to indulge the script in this way. She sets up most of the shots with her main character’s back to us and with the camera’s focus on the supporting cast’s facial reactions toward him, keeping the audience from focusing solely on Lenny as the chief narrator. The result is that you truly learn who Lenny is through his wife Lila’s hysterical weeping, his lover Kelly’s bemusement at his advances, and her parent’s simmering glares of disapproval.
The Heartbreak Kid is all at once a poignant, hilarious, and vicious retelling of the male romantic fantasy, the likes of which I feel only a woman could have been so acutely aware of in the 1970s. In the current climate of the #MeToo movement, it’s a gift to see any film that shines a realistic light on the damage done by men who treat women like objects. A true triumph of female filmmaking!
Jenna Ipcar is a Brooklyn-based critic who has been writing about film for online publications since 2013. She co-founded Back Row (www.back-row.com), a female-run movie review website and podcast.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels
(Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles)
Paradise Films, 1975, Belgium | Color, 201 minutes, Drama
Three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman as she cooks, cleans, and takes clients for sex.
Director: Chantal Akerman
Producers: Evelyne Paul,
Corinne Jénart
Cinematography: Babette Mangolte
Screenplay: Chantal Akerman
Starring: Delphine Seyrig
(“Jeanne Dielman”), Jan Decorte (“Sylvain Dielman”)
“I do think it’s a feminist film because I give space to things which were never, almost never, shown in that way, like the daily gestures of a woman. They are the lowest in the hierarchy of film images. A kiss or a car crash comes higher, and I don’t think that’s accidental. It’s because these are women’s gestures that they count for so little.”
—Chantal Akerman
Jeanne
