Fruit of Paradise (1970) review

Chytilová - after swallowing several "magical sugar cubes" - takes her band of actors to either her parents' backyard or some forest to roll around in the dirt, strip naked and run in the foliage and play with an orange balloon - oh, did I forget to mention it's some kind of dumb Adam and Eve allegory? I'd like to think there was originally a point to all this, but if so it was completely lost in the visual muddle and Chytilová scrambling the footage in the editing room, effectively destroying not only the picture's purpose but any kind of cohesion: and no, sixties filmmakers, altering timelines and frame rates and emulating what I'll call an "amateur" aesthetic did not necessarily free cinema from its "restrictive chains" (it sometimes made its makers look like pretentious hacks).