Daisies
Daisies is a Czechoslovakian movie about two girls who spend a lot of time lazing around and eating. They are both called Marie. It is one hour and sixteen minutes long and gets a lot done with that time, even if nearly all of it is Marie 1 and Marie 2 lazing around and eating.
There isn’t a plot exactly. One of them keeps going on dates with old men, and the other pops up during it so she can score some free food. Each time they go to the train station, I think having fooled the guy that at least one of them is going home with him, before jumping off at the last minute and going home to eat more and laze around. This might sound sedate, but every filmmaking trick in the book is thrown at it, different colours, filters, speeds, there’s a bit where they cut each other’s heads off with scissors and their heads and bodies walk around talking to each other before rejoining. Their room is filled with colours and paper and rubbish and a bathtub full of milk, and they eat in bed, and at one point hang a bunch of paper off the ceiling and light it on fire for fun. They get drunk in a 1920s style nightclub and cause a scene, and then rob the bathroom attendant. One of the Maries tries to commit suicide by turning the gas on but forgets to close the gigantic apartment window.
They get ignored by cyclists on the street and have an existential crisis about whether they exist or not.
In a final, glorious sequence, they sneak into a hotel and find a gigantic banquet laid out and absolutely demolish it, eating everything, stepping on it, walking on the table, destroying everything, before the chandelier falls on them and they end up in some body of water. Some sailors refuse to help them and they go back and do a very half-assed job of cleaning up the feast. I guess they learned their lesson.
What did I learn? The movie opens with footage of planes bombing somewhere, and there’s more war footage at the end. There’s some kind of criticism here about the bourgoise and overconsumption, or alternatively about how rigidly obeying the rules is stupid, but mainly, their life sure does seem fun. There’s something about the Soviet Union in there too, presumably, being from 1966. It’s definitely the kind of thing that gets banned for a while, that always works.