" One should try everything, " insists one of the two heroines of Daisies (1966), the best-known of Vera Chytilová’s works. It might be a motto for the Czech director, whose films overflow with surprises and experiments. Heedless of cliché and formula, Chytilová explodes narrative and bends the frame: her films don’t stop until they’ve filled every crevice with invention.

With a savagery and a dark humor worthy of Lautréamont or Rimbaud, Daisies, which kicks off the Museum of Fine Arts’ Chytilová retrospective on May 21 at 7:45 p.m. (another screening follows on May 25 at 11 a.m.), attacks any pretense that human society is more than a mechanism for organizing the consumption of food. The only film worthy to share a triple bill with Luis Buñuel’s Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie and Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Just for the Hell of It, Chytilová’s masterpiece is the swift odyssey of two young women, both named Marie, in a Prague of fancy restaurants, nightclubs, and riverside boardwalks. Everywhere they go, they disrupt and disconcert with their indiscriminate hunger and thirst.

The Maries have no apparent status or position; maybe the dark-haired one is supported by one or more of the rich men who seek her favors and whose hopes for a romantic evening are repeatedly foiled by her redheaded counterpart. The latter has her own admirer, a butterfly collector whose ardent rhetoric ( " You don’t belong to this century " ) is extraordinarily unsuited to the object of his affections. She’s a stranger to amorous feelings. " I don’t understand why they say ‘I love you,’  " she confesses. " Why don’t they say ‘egg?’  " Romantic love is but one of the bourgeois ideals sacrificed over the course of the film: the women also smash the cinematic illusion of three-dimensional space, as they scissor up their own film images into a jigsaw of body parts. Their destructiveness reaches a peak in a magnificent sequence in which they reduce a fancy banquet to a pulverized mess, then, after swinging on the chandelier for a while, feel pangs of socialist responsibility ( " We’ll be happy because we’re hard-working " ) and play at repairing their damage.

" The world has gone bad " is a refrain in Daisies. Chytilová, who described her film as a morality play, no doubt saw her two heroines to some extent as satirical portraits of a parasitic class bred by capitalism. Yet their anarchism is infinitely more potent than the scandalized reasonableness surrounding them. In the end, Daisies leaves us with the ambiguity of pure negation. The world may have gone bad, but there is no good to be seen, and the two girls’ answer, to make themselves worse than the world, is understandable and attractive.

Chytilová’s next film, the 1969 Fruit of Paradise (also known as We Eat the Fruit of the Trees of Paradise; May 23 at 6 p.m. and May 24 at 2:10 p.m.), resembles Daisies in that the Edenic innocence of the allegorical characters (notably a flirtatious wife and a phlegmatic Satan) is already rotten at the core. To a perverted fairy tale of resort intrigues, Chytilová adds a mystery plot involving a serial killer. The color scheme of decayed browns and greens gets overlaid with bleeding scarlet; Zdenek Liska’s avant-garde score plays over every scene. The least that can be said for this enigmatic film is that it creates and obeys its own laws.

Subtitled " The Genesis of a Community, " the neglected 1979 masterpiece Prefab Story (a/k/a Panel Story; May 24 at 3:50 p.m.) is set at a complex of huge apartment blocks in Prague. Amid the continual renovation that has transformed the space between the buildings into a chaos of dirt and rubble, numerous characters wander in and out of the plot, badgering one another, eating, drinking, making love. In the absence of official authority (an ineffectual policeman is more at sea here than anyone else), the inhabitants of the complex make their own order. Minding other people’s business is both the original sin of this world and its possible salvation. In one scene, a pregnant woman berates two workmen for questioning her presence in a flat into which she has moved on her own initiative. While another woman goes into labor, an old man diverts medical help to an old woman who has retreated, seemingly permanently, behind the dirty window of her balcony. The camera is restless, erratic; the defiance of " professional " filmmaking standards is total; the pleasures of the film are infinite.