Montenegro tango

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.

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.

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

From the director of Sweet Movie and The Coca-Cola Kid, this English-language film is very reminiscent of the latter (which was made four years later). It's just a very odd, quirky comedy. It also contains bits of blistering, hilarious eroticism. It's hard to make eroticism humorous. The film's most memorable bit involves an exotic dancer dodging a remote-control tank armed with a dildo. The story involves a wife (Susan Anspach) who tries to catch up with her husband (Erland Josephson, RIP) as he boards a flight. Unfortunately, she packed garden shears, which gets her taken to a small, back room for searching. There she meets up with a Yugoslavian immigrant, with whom she attempts to catch a ride home. They get sidetracked, though, to a settlement of other Yugoslavian immigrants, where her adventure begins. Meanwhile, Josephson returns home, not knowing what happened to his wife. The film is very airy and enjoyable. It doesn't equal out to much at the end. I'd rank it a ways below The Coca-Cola Kid, but it's well worth checking out.