Daisies

Starring: Jitka Cerhova, Ivana Karbandova, Julius Albert

If the entire world is bad, why shouldn't we be? Adopting this insolent attitude as their guiding philosophy, a pair of hedonistic young women (Ivana Karbanova and Jitka Cerhova), both named Marie, embark on a gleefully debauched odyssey of gluttony, giddy destruction, and antipatriarchal resistance, in which nothing is safe from their nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. But what happens when the fun is over? Matching her anarchic message with an equally radical aesthetic, director Vera Chytilova, with the close collaboration of cinematographer Jaroslav Kucera, unleashes an optical storm of fluctuating film stocks, kaleidoscopic montages, cartoonish stop-motion cutouts, and surreal costumes designed by Ester Krumbachova, who also cowrote the script. The result is Daisies, the most defiant provocation of the Czechoslovak New Wave, an exuberant call to rebellion aimed squarely at those who uphold authoritarian oppression in any form.

• Format: Blu-ray
• UPC: 715515278713
• Release Date: January 1
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Publisher: The Criterion Collection
• Director: Vera Chytilova
• Starring: Jitka Cerhova, Ivana Karbandova, Julius Albert
• Runtime: 1 hour, 15 minutes
• Number of Disks: 1
• Other Video Info: Blu-ray; Subtitled
• Weight: 0.37 lbs.