In the beginning, or near the beginning at any rate, there was Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, happy to spend time together and worship God, not to mention doing exactly what He told them to. That was until after frolicking one day Eve's attention was drawn to the Tree of Knowledge, which their Heavenly Father had ordered them never to touch, and definitely never eat the fruit from its branches. But Eve happened to meet the Serpent and he invited her to partake of its bounty, then ask Adam if he wanted to try some himself, and so it was the events were set in place that saw the pair expelled from the Garden. But in the present, where does this leave the human race?
If you think about it, putting that tree in such easy reach was a pretty stupid move for God, yet think about it some more and you realise it was entrapment since the deity is all-knowing, therefore would be well aware Adam and Eve would be tempted by the Serpent, so patently wanted his two human creations to clear off out of Eden. The question is why, and if Czech director Vera Chytilová had any ideas, she was keeping them wrapped up in this wildly overstuffed allegory and metaphor that Fruit of Paradise largely consisted of. That Eden beginning was presented in some of the most arresting visuals of the New Wave she was part of, a chaos of music and colour that whets the appetite for something special.
Some would have it that her earlier film Daisies had already delivered something special, and it remains her most famous work in the cinema during a career that was dogged with censorship issues thanks to her insistence on not following her fellow contemporaries and emigrating to a more amenable artistic climate. Sure enough, this film was banned by the authorities and she spent practically the whole of the seventies struggling to get anything made at all, so strict were the powers that over what was allowed on Czech cinema screen. However, it could simply have been Chytilová's work was so dense with meaning that they didn't understand it: a sure way to anger ultra-conservative cultural leaders.
On the other hand, maybe the director's champions were misguided and she was so caught up in her own mind that there was less than met the eye; she would at times lament that too few audiences understood what she was getting at, so perhaps the fault was with her? With that kept in mind, you might have anticipated settling down to watch Fruit of Paradise as too much of an ordeal to bother with, but should you give it a chance, fair enough not everyone was going to perceive the meaning as intended, but the sheer barrage of sound and visual meant for a bracing experience that assuredly had talent behind it. Maybe an unfettered talent that needed more discipline, yet this came across as straight from the heart, an examination of the battle of the sexes.
And combined with that a snarling takedown of the paternalism that Chytilová had to encounter every time she crafted a new work, which you could conceivably regard as a withering criticism of the authorities in the then-Czechoslovakia as much as it was placing the disillusionment women could experience with men in general. This took the form of a series of loosely linked sequences revolving around Eva (Jitka Novákova), a pixie-like woman who looks older in closeup than she does from further away and her happy-go-lucky attitude that gradually ebbs as she tries to deny the man she loves is a serial killer, but then eventually has to accept the deep flaws in her relationship. To convey this thorny problem the director assembled a twisted party atmosphere as Eva laughs and dances her way through such diversions as playing with a balloon with the other attendees at the sanatorium and its surroundings this is mostly set in, or hitching up her skirt to rubber stamp the number 6 on her thigh, or getting wrapped in red cloth, leaving you lost or kind of agreeing. Fine music by Zdenek Liska.
