Daisies (Czech: Sedmikrásky) is a 1966 Czechoslovak experimental surrealist comedy film[2][3] written and directed by Věra Chytilová.

Widely regarded as a milestone of the Czechoslovak New Wave movement,[4][5] the film follows two young women, both named Marie (played by Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová), as they engage in a series of bizarre and anarchic pranks.

[1] Originally conceived as a satire of bourgeois decadence, the film critiques societal norms and those who rigidly adhere to rules.

[10] The film opens with a title sequence alternating between shots of a spinning flywheel and wartime footage of airplanes strafing and bombing the ground.

In the final scene,[d] the Maries return to the dining room, clean up the mess, and set the table with broken dishes and glasses.

Chytilová's extensive use of the "doll" metaphor is a means to show a male-dominated society's absurd expectations of women by overplaying their stereotypical attributions.

[13] Usually observed in sexist narratives, women are portrayed as lesser beings and by blowing these assumptions out of proportion, Chytilová aims to show the absurdity of the "patriarchal idea of femininity".

[8] A visiting professor at Staffordshire University and author of The Czechoslovak New Wave, Peter Hames commented that the officials "objected primarily to its avant-garde form, the fact that the girls didn't provide a moral example, and they no doubt correctly saw it as an attack on establishment values".

The film has little plot structure, scenes proceed from one to the next chaotically, frequently switching between black and white, color, and filtered or tinted footage.

[13] Academic criticism has ranged from describing the film as ultimately anti-capitalist, anti-socialist, feminist, or with a variety of genre-confounding implications outside of the typical philosophical strains.

[19] Author Milan Kundera called the film "masterly made" and wrote that the "monstrosity of the main characters was depicted elegantly, poetically, dreamlike and beautifully, but without becoming any less monstrous".

[1] However, after being criticized by the communist MP Jaroslav Pružinec during interpellations in May 1967, the film was pulled from all major cinemas for "depicting the wanton" and was subsequently only screened in smaller venues.

French journalist Pierre Billard, writing for L'Express, compared Daisies to Mack Sennett and Marx Brothers movies and called it "a grand celebration of absurdities with technical finesse and marvellous art direction so rarely achieved".

Bosley Crowther described it in The New York Times as a "Pretentiously kookie and laboriously overblown mod farce about two playgirls who are thoroughly emptyheaded.

"[22] New Zealander freelance film critic Carmen Gray directly addressed Crowther's assessment 55 years later by writing, "What he failed to recognize was that, under patriarchal and totalitarian oppression, clearing one's own mind can be a radical act of deprogramming."