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Quite by accident, they meet the last man on earth—an aged Adam, too feeble to father children. His prize possession is a windup Gramophone with one record, Roll Out the Barrel, a toy the girls covet. At his dwelling—the abandoned Hotel Ozone—the old lady enjoys one final, dreamlike dinner by candlelight. Then she dies, knowing that the race will die with her and with the girls she has overseen since their childhood. Her charges pack up to resume their wandering, and try to take the Gramophone with them. When the old man protests, they gun him down like an animal and resume their aimless journey. Director Jan Schmidt has given Ozone the spare style of a Kafka fable, abetted by Poničanová's tragic portrait of a woman who seems to be lifted directly from a Kollwitz engraving.
The First Cry owes much to the work of Alain Resnais. In such films as Hiroshima Mon Amour and La Guerre Est Finie, Resnais flashed back and forth between present and past, giving sense impressions that made the pictures considerably more than the sum of their parts. Jaromil Jireš, 31, who made The First Cry three years ago, tries the same technique with moderately interesting results. A young woman is awakened by labor pains. She arouses her husband (Josef Abrhám) and begins to recall their first meeting, the affair that followed, the marriage. Abrhám, a television repairman, takes her to the hospital, then goes on his rounds, gazing at the young with the fresh insight of a new father. In one sequence, as he watches schoolchildren make a game of an airraid drill, his mind—and the camera—recall the real thing, complete with screaming jets and exploding bombs.
The First Cry gains its greatest power when it abandons trickery and makes surprisingly caustic side excursions into everyday life in Czechoslovakia: the ugly racial prejudice that surfaces when a black African stays too long in a phone booth and precipitates a fight; the prudish moralism of a policeman who makes Abrhám turn the painting of a nude face down; the arrogance of a movie critic who puts down a "bourgeois Italian film" while ogling a couple of girls in bathing suits. Like many films about the young by the young, The First Cry counts somewhat less as a picture than as a promise.
The Daisies is a hippie's pipe dream that looks and sounds like something concocted by a den member of America's own underground cinema clique. Made with Marxism far less than Harpo, the film is not about anything except itself. Two teen-age girls, labeled Marie I and Marie II (Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbonová), live like dolls, chattering and giggling, floundering about in their oversized bed, making a shambles of sets and sense. In scenes suffused with unearthly tints and shades, the girls attack each other with scissors and cut off each other's heads, wear butterflies instead of bikinis, eat food ads instead of food, swing from a chandelier over a banquet table they have just tromped into a mangled mess.