Jitka Cerhová

Watch the legs. The two Maries in Daisies spend a good part of the film on their backs, kicking, and Jitka Cerhová kicks like someone who has been trained to do it in formation. She had. Věra Chytilová found her in 1965 at a Spartakiáda, one of the mass gymnastics displays of the period, a secondary-school student with no acting behind her, and cast her as the dark-haired Marie. Chytilová did not want acting. She wanted a body that would do what it was told with complete conviction, and that is what she got.

Neither Marie performs in any ordinary sense. They squeal, pose, speak in slogans and eat enormous meals in front of men who are paying for them. The best of it is the routine they run on an Elderly Gentleman (Julius Albert): one Marie is taken to a restaurant, the other turns up uninvited and orders everything she can see, and then the pair walk him to the station and wave him onto a train with such sincerity that he believes they are sorry to see him go. We laughed hardest at the waving, and kept laughing each time the film brought it round again, because Cerhová and Karbanová wave the way children do, with the whole arm and nothing at all behind the eyes. The film repeats itself for 76 minutes and does not apologise. Nor does she.

Some critics, then and since, have found the Maries empty-headed, and they are; that is the joke. The two young women have decided the world is spoilt and they will be spoilt too, and a trained actress might have let a little irony leak through to reassure us. Cerhová has none to leak. She plays every squeal at face value, and the flatness is what makes the satire land. It is a performance with no inside, which sounds like a complaint and is not.

There was not much afterwards. A few small parts followed through the late 1960s and early 1970s, a loose girl in Jan Němec's Martyrs of Love (1967), a salesgirl in The Detour (1968), the kind of young woman of uncertain standing that Czechoslovak films kept in the background. She worked as a model. Chytilová called her back once, for The Apple Game (1976), and then she married, moved to Paris at the end of the 1970s and stopped. We have not reviewed the later films and will not judge them; they drew little attention at the time either.

In 2013 she told a French newspaper it was only the second interview of her life. The first had been in 1965, while Daisies was being shot. That seems about right. One film, one summer, and a young woman who was never really an actress, kicking her legs under a colour filter while a man watches his money go. Most careers do not leave a picture that clear.