Sweet Movie

The satirical Sweet Movie teases the viewer with its well-executed, comical, opening scenes of the Miss Monde Virginity Contest before delivering the main body of the film, what might be more aptly titled "Disgusting Movie". Nearly incomprehensible and pseudo-symbolic, Makavejev's film is comprised mainly of scenes depicting actual urination (seemingly the filmmaker's obsession), defecation, and vomiting, combined with stock footage of the exhumed remains of apparent WWII concentration camp victims.

The film follows the separate adventures of two female characters: Anna Planeta (Anna Prucnal), a mentally ill murderess, and Miss Monde 1984 (Carole Laure), a victimized beauty who slowly succumbs to mental illness. The film's title is ambiguous, referring to the sugar and candy stocked on board Anna's boat, bait which she uses to lure her prey, and to the "sweetness" of Miss Monde's virginity. The title is also ironic in its reference to the bitterness of harsh reality. The potential meaning of the film can be squeezed out of the brief, somewhat disjointed conversation between Anna and the Potemkin mariner (Pierre Clementi) near the film's end: Mariner: "Are you afraid of the past?" Anna: "I brought a lot of sugar, but I can't get rid of the bitter taste." Mariner: "Anyway, it leaves a trace." Anna: "And the witnesses must disappear."

This mostly depressing film does have its moments -- a few comical scenes involving lovely actress Carole Laure. Anna Prucnal's striptease, performed in front of a group of young boys, is equally fascinating but anti-climactic. And John Vernon (Dirty Harry, Outlaw Josey Wales, Animal House), in the role of Mr. Kapital, is particularly memorable. Sweet Movie is certainly interesting and different but falls short of a recommendation.

Dusan Makaveyev views--or viewed, back in the day--cinema as a form of Reichian orgone therapy. He sought to do to the spectator what a Reichian analyst does to a patient: take them out of their culturally accreted "armor" and return them to the Self Within. As the therapist tries to "free up" the encrusted body, so does Makaveyev try to free us up--in this picture, with a climax that violates so many taboos of civilization I dare anyone, even the most liberal-minded, not to be helplessly physically revulsed by it. This seems to be Makaveyev's aim: to push us through our ingrained disgusts to get us back in touch with the palpable physicality of being human. This means a long scene in which the eating of a meal gets mixed up with bulimic yakking, spitting, gargling, drooling, the smearing of food, and finally, ecstatically, a display of public execration.

Back to anality, to fluids, to helpless babbling and expectorating--this is where Makaveyev wants us to go: pre-art, pre-politics, back to the anal-infantile wallow in the flesh. Makaveyev, even more than Cronenberg, is the most bodily of directors. You can almost reach out and feel everyone in this movie, from Mr. Muscles, a blankly grinning black bodybuilder, to the icky slobs spitting green beans on a huge, allegorical boat. Makaveyev is Mr. Anti-Transcendence. The tingling of nerves of our imperfect bodies is all we have. Makaveyev uses shock tactics to take us back there--like cutting from a gentle romantic scene to the ultimate anti-Reichian use of the body: Nazi doctors prodding at charred corpses.

In its wild and easy mingling of the pornographic, the horrific, and the gag-reflex-destructive, SWEET MOVIE feels like one of the (willfully) freest movies ever made. Makaveyev is a master filmmaker who was most recently found, via the Internet, as an instructor at Harvard, where one of his jobs was to "moderate" and politely sit by an undergraduate audience with Mel Gibson. Times ain't what they used to be for an anarchic, anti-ideological egghead/hedonist. Dig up SWEET MOVIE and mourn the world that could've been.

They don't make movies like this anymore. Even Dusan Makavejev himself shied from experimenting further along the route of sexual anarchy, ending up as a pale shadow of his former, rousing self. It brings to memory the golden days of the early 70's, when radical sex and politics thrived in the cinemas along with traditional Hollywood-fare, and movies were still considered dangerous and subversive. The movie itself is funny, tasteless, allegorical and even has glorious in-jokes. Like the river-boat "Potemkin" sailing down the Seine with the enormous head of Lenin in the prow. The gold-painted, urinating penis was, by the way, not cut from the picture when I saw it at the age of 15. I never recovered from the shock.

...and if that statement makes sense, you should see this movie! This is a very funny movie for its first half, because one-of-a-kind director Dusan Makavejev populates his mess of randomness with the same docu-in-your-face absurdity and crude outrageous view of sex that his best film, WR, had. We meet Mr. Kapital (John Vernon, of all people, though it is not his own genitals used when the character is seen on camera with them dipped in gold) who brushes a napkin across his daughter (if it is his daughter, maybe his girlfriend, played by Carole Laure) on one side of the super loose narrative-side, and on the other Potemkin Sailor (ho-ho), who takes on board a stray, even though to have sex with her will lead to certain death.

Then there's also Jeremiah Muscle, who flaunts his black snake like it's nobody's business but the lady's, and a Hispanic singing sensation (on record only, of course, as he makes a music video with the backdrop of the Eifel tower, leading to getting stuck with another women in the act), all mixed up in a crazy lot of scenes that emphasize phallus imagery, the female form, and bright, primary colors- as Makavejev put it "a love letter to Kodak".

This isn't to say the film doesn't take more than a little- actually quite a lot of- work on the viewer to know what the hell is going on. Like WR, the director throws in a few times throughout some real found-documentary footage, only this time without much relevance to the film that the director has made around it (albeit the song used in the clips is excellent). And yet for the first half of Sweet Movie this isn't of a terrible concern, at least for one knowing that the unexpected and anarchic is all in tasteless fun. It's is a little like if there was a rogue Marxist (i.e. the awesome pipe Kapital has, and the ship's main mast) who got kicked out of Monty Python and was obsessed with genitals and went off and made an independent film.

That is, for the first half, anyway. After this, when Miss Canada/1984/whomever runs into the commune group- this is where, all of a sudden, the randomness of tasteless acts starts to try one's patience. I can even see what Makavejev was going for here without trying to add to much meaning to what it all is: the disgusting depravity with food, vomiting, infantilism, nudity, barbarism of communism as satire. But it just goes on for much too long; where the first half had little stabs of wild wit, this, along with the long sequence with Anna Planeta around the young boys, soon fall flat not because of there not being any cohesive narrative structure, but because they just aren't as captivating, or hilarious, as what came before.

It might be a tough act to follow such a crafty and controversial hybrid like WR Mysteries of the Organism, but Makavejev's method of throwing caution completely into the wind soon starts to reel into the tedious, with the exception of the sugar sex scene and Laure's naked chocolate session, which are some of the best scenes in the film. This being noted, the shards that do work in Sweet Movie make it a somewhat worthwhile viewing; certainly for those who are die-hard avant-garde cineasts Sweet Movie marks as something like an X-rated milkshake- lots and lots of nudity and pushing-the-line sexual acts done to a style that can only come out of a man with a real vision at work.

What it is precisely I can't quite say. It is, at the least, an 'experience' of its time and mood. That it's not the sort of work one would want to watch it again from start to finish for quite a long time (unlike WR) is its biggest sort of drawback.

There are some films that are designed to shock, some designed to titillate, some that delight in disgusting the view. For Makavejev, shock, disgust and titillation are never the purpose, but a means to a form of psycho-liberation. Makavejev in Sweet Movie hurtles us head first into the confronting theses of Post-Freudian Wilhelm Reich. We are forced to confront our relationship to our primal beings. He literally smears our consciousness with faeces, vomit and carnality.

We cannot watch orgiastic scenes of regressive acts, a sensual striptease played out inches from the faces of young boys, Carol Laure masturbating in a pool of molten chocolate without a visceral reaction. We are forced to confront our own repressed desires and shine a light in the dark recesses of our own psyche.

Here is revolution at it's most personal, montaged together with lashings of wild humour. Allow your head to give up control and come along for the ride. Recommended to anyone who is willing to put their concept of themselves on the line a risk a flirtation with prurient madness.

8/10