So this is a movie that I think it’s fair to say is very much of its time. It was made in Communist Czechoslovakia in 1966, and both it and its director, Věra Chytilová, were quickly banned.

And it’s easy to see why, because it’s basically this nihilistic avant-garde movie in which two girls decide to misbehave, and go off and scam dudes out of meals, engage in random dissolution, and — in probably the most memorable scene — just utterly destroy a lavish banquet set out in a fancy room, before getting killed by a falling chandelier.

And set out like that, it sounds like a French New Wave movie, sort of — but stylistically, it’s not at all. What it reminds me of is one of those artsy sketch comedy shows (like The State or Upright Citizens Brigade), because it’s all just disconnected scenes that have some kind of visual segue between them. There’s no real narrative through-line, and the scenes mostly don’t have any relationship to each other, and also most of them don’t even have any real narrative in them.

I think if you were a young person feeling repressed by your Communist overlords in Eastern Europe in the ’60s, this movie would speak to you in a direct and liberating kind of way — like, even here and now, it comes off as notably unusual and anarchic. Seeing this as a forbidden thing in some underground theatre in Prague in days of heavy censorship, it probably would have just filled your mind for months.