Die Ballade von Lucy Jordan

A quirky black comedy about a bored housewife in Sweden who spends some time with a group of Yugoslavian gypsies. Anspach, in perhaps her best role, looks great and is terrific as the woman who's slowly going to pieces and must get away from home to regain her sanity. The film is full of loony characters and bizarre situations but it has a strangely endearing quality to it. The scenes at Zanzi Bar, where the Yugoslav characters reside in a Boheminian lifestyle, are brimming with raw sensuality, helped by Zachrisson as an Earth-mother and Gelin as a young prostitute. Ingmar Bergman veteran Josephson is Anspach's perplexed husband. Other eccentric characters include Josephson's father and his shrink.

An hilarious and weird sex comedy from Dusan Makavejev, about an bored, neurotic American woman married into an insane and yet strangely uninteresting Swedish family, who finds release in a group of randy, freedom-loving (if scruffy) Yugoslavian immigrants. Makavejev's take on modern Europe and modern life in general seems just right to me. Susan Anspach makes the most of her leading role, and is better than I've ever seen her before. She never quite broke through as a major star, and her work in Montenegro will leave the viewer wondering why.

Others who have commented on 'Montenegro' seem to miss the film's point. Yes, it is a black comedy; no, it's not nihilistic. The characters do not behave in incomprehensible ways - they behave in ways alien to our Western acculturation & our snobby "everybody must do nice-nice to each other" civility. 'Montenegro' takes effete, overbaked, hypersophisticated, irrelevant Western sensibilities & turns them smack on their pointed little heads.

American Marliyn Jordan (Susan Anspach in a tour de force performance) lives in Sweden with her Swedish husband. Marilyn is not, as other commentators have misapprehended, a bored, psychotic housewife - she's a woman who, in her overbaked Western milieu of mind-blenching affluence, oversensitive men & women, diplomatic euphemism, & arcane, costly, "necessary", psychobabble (brilliantly depicted, & sent up, in the analysis scene), has lost touch with all that's primal, urgent, & vital in herself.

Already whacked out from living in her gilded, padded, safe-till-she's-numbed life, Jordan impulsively hooks up with a completely primal, totally up front & no bones about it, caveman & club bunch of howling, lusty Montenegrans. Once she's with them things happen very differently from the way they failed to happen in her previous ersatz saccharine-junkie life.

Jordan is in for keeps with people who play for keeps. Lust, blood, sex, ooze, vendettas, vengeance - all the primal, classical, down-deep-in-human-nature emotions & their instantaneous acting-out - are how things are for Jordan now in Montenegro. The suddenness, violence, & clarity of emotion & action repulses us because we're so used to warning labels on everything from cigarette lighters & child safety seats, & from self-esteem minuets in schools to language prohibitions in our workplaces. All that's out the window in 'Montenegro' with Marilyn Jordan fast losing her melancholia & madness, & rushing headlong into shameless, unbridled lust, man-baiting, cat-fighting, & knock-down (with that caveman club!) & drag out sex.

Watching 'Montenegro' we Westerners are intrigued, repelled, fascinated, revolted - but we can't turn away from the fluids & furze, the basal & nasal sensation, the genitals-out-in-the-winds-of-Fate abandon, & the cathartic, orgasmic, lethal, & vital primordial reckoning that is 'Montenegro' exploding on our retinae, in our ears, on our skin, in our nostrils, & in our wide-open mouths.

One wonders if Camille Paglia has seen 'Montenegro' because one expects she'd love it, because this film delves into things primal that Paglia's betes noires - radical gender feminist ideologues - reject and label "patriarchal violence against women" & "not women's way of knowing". Let's just say that 'Montenegro' isn't likely to be high on Gloria Steinem's, Patricia Ireland's, or Susan Sontag's list of all-time favorite films. That alone tells how worthy this film is of wide open embrace & enjoyment: 'Montenegro' doesn't cave or cop to salon intellectualism, pop psychology, Botox beauty, animal rights activist solipsism, or moral relativism. This is the real deal: down to brass tacks humanity stripped of culture & deodorant & Sani-Pure flush toilets & sparkling bidets & layers of insulation from the Real.

'Montenegro' isn't Greek Tragedy, it's not Shakespearian artistry, & it sure isn't Frank Capra or Spike Lee - it's pure primal, take no prisoners, heads-on-lances, bareass naked human nature turning back the clock & stripping away the veneer of Western propriety. It's an enrapturing, refreshing, uncensored look at the way we humans were...and still are. 'Monetenegro' gives us a pungent whiff of how we smell without deodorant, look without makeup, feel without politically correct "civilized" Thought Police cues, touch with unwashed hands, & taste blood-rare meat without first checking to be sure our side of veggies is certified to be "organic", washed, or attractively presented. Nobody calls for a cop in Montenegro, watches Oprah, or cares less what Dr. Phil advises; nobody hails a waiter without ducking for the dagger that will come hurtling his way; & nobody bats an eyelash without understanding up front that it means, "Come hither: Now!" In 'Montenegro' nobody trifles with food & wine & sex & death because they're the stuff of everyday life - life on the edge, life in the Now, into which Marliyn Jordan, body & soul, hurls herself.

This is a nihilist black comedy about the emptiness of success and riches.

Susan Anspach is an American housewife, 40ish, married to a rich Swede, and living in a palatial Stockholm seaside residence. She's bored and frustrated. Her father-in-law is 80ish and auditioning wives. Her children are helping their grandfather with the auditions. Her husband is always out of town, and when he's in town he won't sleep with her. Gradually, her behavior is becoming more and more erratic.

When she is denied permission to board a plane to Brazil (because she tried to carry oversized gardening shears on board), she falls in with some struggling Yugoslavian immigrants, and is attracted by their zestful, lusty craziness.

This movie is completely nihilistic. All of the characters are painted in very broad comic brushstrokes, ala Dr. Strangelove, and the sets and situations border on the surrealistic. (There's even a dysfunctional clock homage to Dali's "Persistence of Memory")

This is one odd movie, but I liked it a lot. One cannot expect the characters to behave as people really would, but the movie is energetic and hilarious in sections, erotic in other sections, and the production values are impressive.

This was made in 1981. The director never really made a brilliant movie, but he should have. There is so much talent in evidence here.

The movie is rather captivating in the way it teases you with the sexiness of the main character. From the airport search to the way she is approached by the young girl. i got a feeling of Cabaret during some of the dance scenes. The rawness of the sexual encounters seemed to exemplify the statement the officer at the airport said, "There is plenty of food in this country". It made me feel as if I was an immigrant dealing with the restraints of a modern country. The sex scenes were tasteful for an early 80's film and the lure of the folk like style of the people displayed the fact that she was less naive then they were. The last part seemed like a joke that sealed the blackness of the film. It seemed unnecessary but the statement rang through. How all of the decadence of her real life was totally repulsive to the viewer and the lead. I watched it with my wife and found the tension of what they would do to the lead character as she went deeper into their world almost unbearable. Little did I know it was the opposite.Great movie that holds up well through time.