Presumably, its domestic viewers understood Daisies’ nuanced commentary better than the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther, who, after seeing the film in June 1967, disparaged it as “pretentiously kookie” and its central pair as “thoroughly empty-headed.” What he failed to recognize was that, under patriarchal and totalitarian oppression, clearing one’s own mind can be a radical act of deprogramming. Chytilová’s cowriter Ester Krumbachová more astutely captured the possibilities embodied by the Maries when she said that they could just as well have been “two generals”—a contradictory description befitting a film with such an anarchic refusal to pander to expectations. The pair push the conventions of femininity to absurd breaking points, revealing them as flimsy constructions. When they march in file, swinging their arms and chanting, “We exist! We exist!” and a montage of padlocked doors follows, it is clear they have harnessed a revolutionary potential that could break through barricades.

Played by Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová (nonprofessionals, in keeping with Chytilová’s disregard for craft conventions), the Maries outsmart the older men who try to lure them into bed with expensive meals. In episodes played for rambunctious comedy, they run up restaurant tabs before ditching their dates at the station. Being deemed desirable is of no concern to them: one crashes the other’s date and orders a slew of dishes to sloppily gorge on. In one ebullient sequence, the drunken friends fall across the tables of bemused dance-hall patrons and steal the limelight from the dancers. Their energy overflows in all directions; the Maries refuse to police their bodies to conform to the rules of prim comportment. Their impertinence, which leaves those around them shocked and speechless, is thrilling. This warpath of mayhem escalates to a finale in which they sneak into a banquet hall where a feast has been spread for Communist officials. The two throw food, walk on dishes atop a table in a parody of a catwalk, and swing on a chandelier—which falls and crushes them.

Daisies has most often been viewed through the lens of the anti-totalitarian resistance of the Czechoslovak New Wave. Certainly, the Maries’ hedonistic appetites and ultimately fatal pranks are the very antithesis of productivity-obsessed official Communist ideology, which promised an eternal utopia to hardworking heroes who were prepared to sublimate their individualistic urges. The state censors, recoiling from the film’s avant-garde sensibilities and pessimistic vision of dissipated youth, cited the decadent waste of food on-screen as particularly immoral. Daisies’ sardonic end title is a dedication to “all those whose sole source of indignation is a trampled-on trifle,” which takes aim at the hypocrisy of censuring such a spectacle while turning a blind eye to much graver abuses of power.

The Maries are, in a sense, nobodies. With no residency registrations, jobs, discernible family ties, or even individual names, they operate on the civic margins. What to do all day, and whether it matters, is a conversational refrain between them. Their chaotic interventions into their environment seem almost compulsive, necessary just to prove to themselves that they exist. “Can you feel how volatile life is?” one asks the other. With no malleability or eagerness to please, they’re in touch with humanity’s endless potential for defiant revolt—even if they possess no defined vision of the future and are as vertiginously close to nihilism as they are to absolute freedom.

Inside their shared apartment, the two sprawl out in do-it-yourself tableaux of green apples, against walls embellished with painted numbers and papered with magazine pictures and glossy leaves. They slice phallic gherkins and sausages with scissors, set fire to streamers, cut out images of flowers, and even suggest abandoning the laws of language by changing the arbitrary meanings of words. Nothing is fixed in place in this world that they can so casually craft into a surrealist collage. When the Maries turn on the gas—to no effect, because the window is open—they do it with such upbeat nonchalance that it seems even death possesses no finality over them. They get carried away with their scissors and cut off each other’s heads, which float across the frame. Without boundaries, their snips even disintegrate the screen—which Chytilová presents as a shattered mosaic of moving fragments. Images are sliced and reconstituted, just as the Maries jubilantly abstract and rearrange their bodies; the very form of Daisies often seems as averse as they are to adhering to any system.

In generative symbiosis with cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera, her husband at the time, Chytilová reveled in a dance of visual spontaneity. Daisies veers between different film stocks and tinted filters, color and black and white. A train shown leaving the station, as the giggling Maries speculate about its destination, segues into a breakneck, pastel-hued blur of psychedelia and winding tracks. Over and over, reality dissolves as delirious imagination takes flight. Movement is so dynamic that a slap from one Marie can propel the other from a room into a field of flowers, assisted by sound bridges and matches on action, indifferent to the laws of time and space.

This extravaganza of formal experimentation leaves no doubt as to where Chytilová’s sympathies lie, her own rule-breaking representing directorial complicity in the Maries’ rebellion, even if she did suggest in interviews that Daisies was a lesson in how not to behave. Obliqueness is a powerful tool for artists seeking to evade censors, as potential meanings can be denied amid a canny multivalence that allows maverick signals to be picked up by those who need them. When a threat of punishment or silencing looms, artists’ publicly declared intentions are rarely the definitive guide to a film’s possible meanings.

Chytilová had from the beginning of her career portrayed loud, unmanageable women who were not content to play second fiddle to anyone. The mischief-making camaraderie of the young women in a factory dormitory in her midlength, vérité-style A Bagful of Fleas (1962) is a precursor to the Maries’ full-fledged sabotage. Her debut feature, Something Different (1963), in one of its two intertwined stories, shows the training of the real-life gymnast Eva Bosáková (playing a version of herself). In more conventional hands, such material might have been couched as a glowing tribute to socialist sporting prowess. Instead, Chytilová intercuts the Olympian’s grueling regimen with the experiences of a dissatisfied housewife, exploring the various ways in which women’s options are curtailed.

Despite making work that is unmistakable in its intent to deflate the male ego, Chytilová was uneasy with being called a feminist, a label many in her cohort viewed as a Western import. Her circumspection was echoed by such contemporaries of hers as the Hungarian filmmaker Márta Mészáros. Central European dissidents tended to eye with suspicion slogans and overstated causes; they felt words had been emptied of meaning by the ubiquitous state propaganda that cynically compromised the truths of lived reality in the name of ideas. Václav Havel, in his 1985 essay “The Anatomy of a Reticence,” describes a regional skepticism toward both the “glowing tomorrows” peddled by the Communist regimes and the bombastic ideological pronouncements of Westerners. He does not reject feminism outright (“I know little about it and am prepared to believe that it is far from being the invention of a few hysterical women, bored housewives, or cast-off mistresses”) but does declare that, in Czechoslovakia, “feminism seems simply ‘Dada.’” The fact that this Czech man of letters, looked to by his compatriots as a guardian of the nation’s political conscience, could frame feminism so patronizingly goes a long way toward explaining how common it was for those who publicly identified with the movement to be accused of triviality or posturing. By leaving her work to speak for itself, Chytilová sidestepped such potential stigmatization.

She was, after all, already going out on enough of a limb by producing cinema as radical as Daisies. Unlike a number of her New Wave colleagues, when she was obstructed from making films in Czechoslovakia, she did not emigrate, and she ended up doing uncredited work on commercials. Her late-career films are less overtly experimental than her early ones but do show that she lost none of her subversive vigor in the intervening years. In Traps (1998), a blackly comic rape-revenge farce, a corrupt politician and a smarmy advertising executive are subjected to vigilante justice in the form of castration, by a veterinarian who, like the Maries, has no qualms about going to extremes and circumventing both laws and conventions in a world that is not set up to honor her worth.

“This is the only way they could end up” is typed across the screen near the conclusion of Daisies, as we cut from the falling chandelier to a shot of the Maries floundering in a lake, as if being dunked for practicing witchcraft. There is no consolatory or escapist happy ending, since this is no manipulatively proffered utopian panacea. But death and chaos were often the resort of countercultural art that thumbed its nose at the ideas of progress propagated by Communist regimes. And the threat of punishment that hangs over the practitioners of such free expression allows their defiance to blaze all the brighter.