Die Ballade von Lucy Jordan

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.

Montenegro is, without a doubt, one the freshest, most original and seldom seen gems on the planet. Anspach delivers a personal best as a housewife on the brink of insanity who befriends a band of eccentrics at the Zanzi Bar. What follows is a bizarre odyssey of sexual and emotional discovery. Robust characters, Pinter's beautiful cinematography, and tart humor make this a must. The stuff of life.

To say this movie is weird, is an understatement. But that's what makes this great character study of a film, intriguing, with just the right amount of sex and nudity, complimented by an intriguing weirdness and stylishness. You gotta give it that. Though it's that early pier scene, that stays in my mind, the great Anspach who just commands the screen, with each scene she's in, plays an insanely bored rich little wife, who husband's neglect has worsened to the point of making her completely tipped over. Her frustration is something we really sympathize, if painfully witness, where she goes to some scary lengths, two illustrate her upset. Getting in a bit of strife at the airport, where she's separated from hubby, and ending up with some "not your typical but exciting immigrants", she happily embarks on a rejuvenating adventure with some pretty saucy scenes, some you can well tell, have been toned down. The bizarre yet tragic ending based on fact, is the high point of this whole film, which if far from perfect, but one movie experience, you must indulge once, if even just for the great Anspach. Indulge

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.

It is funny, very erotic, passionate, and riddled with jabs into society's snobbish attitude toward sexual fulfillment…

A very wealthy American woman is married to a dull Swedish businessman… When the husband is about to leave for Brazil, she decides to go along with him, but is held up in customs and misses the plane… Trying to get back home, she is caught up in the life-style of a group of vibrant Yugoslavian immigrants living in Sweden… She falls in love with the peculiar manners of the group and decides to stay for a couple of days, ending up in a romantic affair with one of the workers, singing in a topless bar, and having a lot of fun…

In contrast to Makavejev's other noteworthy films, "WR—Mysteries of the Organism" and "Sweet Movie," "Montenegro" is light and uncomplicated... It's a simple story simply told… The message is the same—sexual repression leads to insanity, but sensual indulgence livens the spirit…

"Montenegro" does not exploit its eroticism; it lets it grow out of the situation, out of the characters… When Susan Anspach is seen taking a shower, it is photographed in a very beautiful, soft manner... When a couple is making love, the camera pans up their reeling bodies only long enough to establish their lovemaking, then moves on