Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Food, Glorious Food
The two main characters in Daisies are constantly eating or at least playing with food. They have lavish dinners at restaurants, bathe in milk and playfully slice bananas and sausage. This trend culminates in the scene in which they sneak into a feast, indulge their palettes, and engage in a food fight. What is the point of all this food, glorious food? Can you make sense of the use of food in at least some of these scenes?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I believe that the food is the MOST important aspect of this movie. My interpretation of the food is that women don’t always have to be classy or follow the rules of society bore upon them by men. The way they eat the food is very unprofessional and sloppy. They do this because no one is making them or should be making them eat a certain way. They have the freedom to scarf down food and not be judged by men. In the famous dining scene where they break into an empty dining hall, I believe it shows they don’t have rules and can do what they choose. Also when dining with the men, they don’t follow a certain etiquette but just stuff their mouths to show the audience that women shouldn’t have a certain expectation or do not need to act like someone that they are not. I believe the bathing in the milk apart from its apparent use to better the skin, shows a contrast to usual expectations. We normally expect baths to be taken with water but what I believe the director is showing is that women can defy expectations and be themselves. Not only do they eat the food but throw it and jump on it. Again, wouldn’t you expect them to eat it? Yet, they do plenty of things with the food that we don’t expect. They express themselves in ways women wouldn’t normally do if they are trying to act classy to impress a man. Overall, I believe food represents the normal expectations for women and the “Daisies” bend those expectations to express themselves.
ReplyDeleteVera’s 1966 film, Daises, was filmed during a short time period known as the Prague Spring. Within Prague Spring the Soviet rule of Czech Republic became more lenient in its laws; the country had a liberal shift. Part of the liberalization in Prague Spring, was the liberation of women’s sexuality. Many conservative views on women’s sexuality are that; women do not actively want sex but merely use it to barter things from men. In Daisies food is often used to symbolize women’s sexual appetite. The films second scene uses food as a symbol, when Marie II picks an apple from a tree. This scene is a biblical reference to Eve creating original sin. In a later scene apples reappear, as Marie I is sitting on a bed choosing between an apple and a pickle. She chooses the apple, inferring that she chooses sin, most likely to be sexual in nature because this takes place on a bed. Food is again a symbol for sexual liberation, in the scene were the sisters are cutting food and talking on the phone. This scene is supposed to symbolize women’s sexuality emasculating men and it does so in two parts. First, we hear Marie II’s lover continually pleading for her over the phone while the girls ignore him. This man by being somewhat over emotional, especially when the emotion is not reciprocated, is emasculating himself. The second emasculation is more literally as the girls cut up male genital shaped food; croissants, pickles, sausages, and pictures of meat out of magazines. Another scene showing women’s sexual liberation is the milk bath scene. In classic literature white, the color of the milk, is used to symbolize purity. In the bath scene, the sisters throw other foods into their bath before getting in. The girls by throwing the food are corrupting the purity they are supposed to have.
ReplyDeleteAfter watching the first few scenes in Daisies, the randomness and lack of order of things left me confused, and I wasn’t sure what to think. The only opinion I had was that the two women, in the ways they acted at the table with the older man and in fooling him at the train station, were pretty obnoxious and uncomfortable to watch. However, as the film went on and I began to embrace the fact that this was the theme, I understood that those initial feelings are exactly what the director intended the viewer to feel. Given the fact that I, a teenage girl in a rather liberal 21st century environment, would feel uncomfortable in response to a film like this just illustrates how appalled the director’s intended audience must have been viewing it in a 1960’s socially conservative Czechoslovakian society. The way food plays into the film is pretty straightforward in my eyes. In a more conservatively patriarchal society, food and women aren’t supposed to go hand in hand. Women are expected to control what they eat, and be petite and act courteous while at the table. The way Marie I and II act in response to these social standards is a complete middle finger to what has been customary for hundreds of years. They carelessly disregard the male authoritative role in society by purposely eating like pigs whenever food comes their way, and there are also a few interesting hints throughout the film demonstrating their resentment towards men. In the scene where they burn the scrolls of the rules society has written for hundreds of years while slicing the pickles and sausages, they do so as they are on the phone with one of the men who had a sexual encounter with one of the Marie’s in a previous scene. He proceeds to obsess over her and plead for her to come back, and the more he does so, the more they continue to slice the sausage and pickles and devour the food. The most defining moment of the scene is when he professes, “Don’t treat me like this, when you know I love you.”, and immediately afterward she cuts the pickle even more aggressively than she had before. It’s a metaphor for castration, and it became all the more obvious when the grabbed a hard boiled egg (genitalia) and began slicing into it as well. Lastly, I found the flower crown one of the girls placed on her head in the first scene of the film to be symbolic as well, as it portrays that women are now the bosses, or queens, of society. The crown reappears in many parts of the film when the girls do their most outrageous things, and during one of the earlier scenes in which they interrupt a dinner between a man and woman at a restaurant, they try to place the crown on the woman’s head, in an innuendo that she shouldn’t be succumbing to the desires of the man. I have absolutely no doubt that this film caused an immense stir to those who watched it in 1960’s Europe, meaning it achieved precisely what it was intended to achieve.
ReplyDelete