Czech director Vera Chytilova offers a modern day imagining of the classic Adam and Eve tale with FRUIT OF PARADISE. Shot in 1970, Chytilova's film follows a couple who eat some "forbidden" fruit while on vacation, which sets them on the path to finding a deadly killer.

Chytilova audaciously mixes allegory with the avant-garde in this operatic tale of a girls' attraction to a devilish serial killer. Using the structure of a crime novel, characters symbolizing Adam and Eve and quotations from Genesis, director plays with the notion that to search for truth is to court death. Chytilovais most experimental work is a strikingly beautiful film in which photography and music combine in a unique celebration of form.

Věra Chytilov?'s Ovoce stromu rajsk?ch j?me (Fruit of Paradise, 1969) is an audacious combination of allegorical narrative and the avant-garde. Above all, it plays with the idea of searching for "truth" and questions our ability to accept it. It is a reflection on the nature of the film itself, as well as a personal testament of its reputedly "cynical" director's commitment to "telling the truth." It is a vivid testimony to the role of the "avant-garde" in 1960s Czechoslovak cinema. It is an ascendant of what Eisenstein described as "intellectual cinema."

However, montage is more or less dispensed with, in favour of a plethora of visual associations and mental juxtapositions that are orchestrated through a succession of semi-improvised "happenings." As Peter Hames has acknowledged, it boldly defies any "realistic" interpretation, yet encourages "active interpretation," demanding that the viewer construct his or her own meaning.

Like its precursor Sedmikr?sky (Daisies, 1966), it is thoroughly "post-modernist" in the sense of the playfulness implied by the term. Yet, contrary to the opinion of its state sponsor, Chytilov?'s reckless playfulness doesn't invite nihilism. Ovoce stromu rajsk?ch j?me may be more obscure than Sedmikr?sky, but it remains a resoundingly "mainstream avant-garde" film, a brilliantly executed aesthetic exercise. It is formalism at its most beautiful.

Believe me, this film is really COOL stuff, even better than her "Daisies" (1966), one of the strangest movie of czech new wave.