Věra Chytilová
1966
74 minutes
You've been wanting to see this for years but have always been thwarted by something. You're not sure quite what to expect, only that it's going to be visually stimulating and weird. The film features two extremely attractive Czech women named Marie who go around getting into all sorts of surreal mischief. They spend a good chunk of the film messily eating, which is really not your thing. You tend to be very squeamish about people making messes and getting their hands dirty.
There is a wonderful scene involving scissors that could be taken out of a particularly titillating Bugs Bunny cartoon, where they start by snipping some of the clothes off each other, and then snipping each other up and the background and the film itself which is rearranged into a bizarre collage. There's probably plenty to be said in this film if you go into a deep dive of analyzing imagery and gender roles and philosophical rot such as that, but if you're watching this for enjoyment you should just soak in the pure anarchic chaos of it all and have a good laugh.
To repeat a cliche, this is one of those movies that reminds us why we like watching movies. It's a bit like poetry. Why write poetry instead of prose? Because it allows you to say something different in an interesting way. Maybe people won't understand what you're saying, but sometimes how you say something is more important than what you're saying.
This film is in Czech, which is a language you don't speak. Most films you tend to watch are in a language you at least have some sort of toehold in. Your French and German are pretty decent, even if watching a film without subtitles would be a bit of a stretch (though that's the case for English as well). For those you can understand much of the dialogue even without the subtitles for help, and every film you watch feels a bit like an additional lesson in that language as an adult. You speak a little bit of Russian, but even that's not much help for the Czech in this film, which might as well be gibberish to you. You have the same experience watching something in Swedish or Japanese. It's always a bit of a struggle, but sometimes you have to force your brain to give up trying to make sense of what they're saying and how it correlates to the English translation and just go with the flow. You're certainly not going to learn any Czech by watching this film.
Time to choose something different: