Fruit of Paradise

The film opens with a long and nearly abstract passage about Adam and Eve in the garden. Then it moves to the present: Eva arrives at a spa with her husband Josef. There she meets a man called Robert who dresses in red. She begins to think he is a murderer and sets out to find proof. Nobody believes her. Věra Chytilová directs. Ester Krumbachová worked on design and costume and Jaroslav Kučera on the photography, the same team as Daisies. The subject is knowledge. Eva wants to learn the truth, and what she learns does her no good at all; the garden section stands as the direct counterpart of that idea. The form pushes narrative into second place. Colour, pattern and framing come first; some passages are wholly abstract and serve no plot at all. Chytilová said it was a feeling rather than an analysis. It was finished in 1970, and at the start of the normalisation period in Czechoslovakia Chytilová's work was stopped; she was unable to make films for years. It screened at the 1970 Cannes film festival. Who it is for: viewers who follow the Czech New Wave and cinema that puts formal experiment first. Who it is not for: the story is hard to follow, there is little dialogue, and the symbols are deliberately unexplained; for anyone wanting plot the film passes empty.