Two young women decide that if the world is spoiled, they might as well be spoiled too. They eat their way through other people’s banquets, cut up phallic foods with scissors, and set their own room’s decorations on fire just to watch them burn.

DAISIES (1966), the Czech film Sedmikrásky, follows Marie I and Marie II, played by Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová. They con older men into buying them dinner, then pack them off on trains. They demolish an elaborate banquet laid out for dignitaries who never arrive. Every rule of decorum is something made to be wrecked.

Věra Chytilová directed and developed the story with Pavel Juráček, then wrote the screenplay with Ester Krumbachová. Cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera helped build the film’s look: collage, shifting color filters, jump cuts, and a visual chaos that mirrors the girls’ appetite for destruction. Czechoslovak authorities banned it, and the wasted food was denounced on the floor of parliament.

It runs 76 minutes and is now read as a feminist landmark of the Czech New Wave, though Chytilová herself rejected the label. Gleeful and furious at once, it treats bad behavior as a form of protest against a society that demands good girls.

The film is dedicated to "all those whose sole source of indignation is a trampled-on trifle."