Fruit of Paradise
aka Ovoce stromů rajských jíme First screened in June 2024 / Most recently screened and reviewed in October 2024
Director: Věra Chytilová. Cast: Jitka Nováková, Karel Novak, Jan Schmid, Helena Ruzicková, Ludek Sobota. Screenplay: Ester Krumbachová and Věra Chytilová. VOR:⑤
Less renowned than its predecessor, but if it weren't pushing artistic and political boundaries, the regime wouldn't have shot it right down.
Daisies is the Věra Chytilová film we're typically encouraged to consider her apex, and I can see why its frisky, freewheeling, dissident Blonde and Brunette Go Boating energy has lots of fans. I nonetheless find myself more partial to Chytilová's Fruit of Paradise, her surrealist 1970 uptake of the Book of Genesis, which starts off with an Edenic collage of such lush stained-glass color, kaleidoscopic texture, and hallucinatory montage that it would be many filmmakers' brightest accomplishment. Here it's just the opener, an immersive preface to the inevitable Fall—not just into sin but also into wit, gamesmanship, power plays, and polysemy. The Devil (or "Robert") stalks around Eva and her phlegmatic mate Adam (or "Josef"), luring them with his wiles but also getting into about a half-dozen graceless bike accidents and getting seduced or tongue-tied by Eva as often as the reverse. Red is of course the color of desire and satanic temptation, but it's a Czech film from 1970, so how can it not also signify Soviet Communism, that other snake in the surrounding grass?
As Fruit of Paradise unfurls, it borrows a world-famous scriptural template while also turning that story against itself in anti-sexist, anti-authoritarian, and apolitically puckish ways. Color continues to convey character, even when it goes drab, just as movement is a key storytelling device even when it freezes or sludges up. Fruit of Paradise has the stuttering frame rates, pantomimed melodramas, and now-you-see-it sleights of hand that overtly recall cinema's magical, Méliès-y beginnings and its naughty, Buñuelian dreams and fantasies. It also sports the lapidary hues and synesthetic abstractions of Brakhage and other midcentury experimentalists, plus the combined satires of sexuality and social structure that pervaded the Czech New Wave of Forman, Menzel, and others, notwithstanding their stylistic and temperamental differences. Chytilová's work here and elsewhere can get a little exhausting in its commitments to repetition and dream logic; some would surely add "self-indulgence." I'm not positive my students will love it, but after two viewings in the last few months, I'm sure getting there fast.Grade:A–
