Something Different

The film gives two women side by side. One is a gymnast: preparing for her last competition, her days spent training, her body tiring, knowing she is at the end of her career. The other is a housewife: she has a husband and a child, her days go in housework, she is bored, and she begins an affair. The two stories never cross; the film gives them in turn. Věra Chytilová directs. The gymnast section is real: Eva Bosáková, a well known athlete of the time, plays herself and those parts were shot as documentary. The housewife section is fiction, shot with actors. That doubleness is the idea. Both lives ask the same thing: how much room to move is there inside an order one did not choose. In one it is being enclosed in a body, in the other in a house. It is Chytilová's first feature, made before Daisies; the formal experiment is already plain. It is among the early works of the Czech new wave, and putting women's experience at the centre was unusual for its time. The cutting between the two narratives is deliberately unbalanced; the scenes are of unequal length and the transitions are placed so as to break the rhythm. Who it is for: viewers who like the Czech new wave and formal experiment. Who it is not for: there is no plot, the structure is demanding, and the two stories never joining will bother some viewers.