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Fruit of Paradise (Věra Chytilová, 1970)
🕑 Added 2020-02-07 23:23:46 +0000 UTC
What a dazzler. Chytilová's fifth feature, and her follow-up to her stone masterpiece Daisies, Fruit of Paradise actually played in competition in Cannes back in 1970. (Allegedly the conservative jury couldn't make heads or tails of it.) Although this film is not as wall-to-wall bonkers as Daisies, it comes pretty close, and is Chytilová's final film to employ such radical experimentation. Czech authorities clamped down on film production around the time Fruit of Paradise was released, and Chytilová didn't make another film for a full eight years following an official time-out by Communist authorities.
A freeform transposition of the Garden of Eden story with the tale of Bluebeard, Fruit of Paradise starts off with a ten-minute sequence that expands on the Brakhage-like collage interludes seen in Daisies. Actually, "expands" isn't quite the word for it. It's more like Chytilová took those formal procedures, which had been used as rhythmic punctuation in the previous film, and plunged headlong into them as if they were a world unto themselves. Using step-printing, stop-motion, intense colorization, and frame-by-frame photography, Chytilová offers the viewer a saturated, kinetic rendition of "paradise," a prelapsarian world before narrative organization parsed cinema into logical bits. It's a marriage between the biblical concept of oneness prior to Eve's temptation and Brakhage's notion of the "untutored eye," capable of unfettered, non-utilitarian seeing. The prospect that the entire film might be like this was, to be honest, exhilarating.
Alas, Chytilová's Eva (Jitka Nováková) eats of the forbidden fruit, throwing us out of the avant-garde and into story-world, although it is hardly a typical one. Eva and her partner, inexplicably named Josef (Karel Novák), are bored with their sylvan life, and Eva goes out exploring. She encounters a strange man in a bright red suit -- the devil perhaps? His name is Robert (Jan Schmid), and he seems to have the ability to seduce men and women with ease. Crowds suddenly appear around him. He is charming and graceful. And soon Eva is intrigued by him.
However, he drops a key from his pocket, and Eva uses it to explore his private sanctum. What she finds there suggests that he is a very dangerous man, but this only intrigues her more. Much of the rest of Fruit of Paradise consists of awkward, almost slapstick movements through the landscape, wherein Eva, Josef, and Robert form temporary pairs in order to work against the other one, yielding a strangely fluid love triangle. They traverse the muddy riverside on bikes, stomp through the mud, attempt to enter society (in the form of restaurants and social events), but the film's rather indirect through-line always comes back to Eva and the instantiation of her desires. Does she want stability, or danger and death?
The division between the prologue and the rest of the film is rather stark, since Chytilová packs so much information into the more experimental sequence, and the rest of the film tends to feel a bit improvisational or aleatory. This marks a difference from Daisies, which feels master-planned from start to finish, and is ultimately the better film for it. Nevertheless, Fruit of Paradise demonstrates that Daisies was no UFO. Chytilová's thinking about new visual forms was systematic and intense, and Fruit of Paradise only confirms what a tremendous loss it was that this phase of her career was cut short by the tankies.
