Um Filme Doce

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.

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.

Wow, this movie may not be the greatest surreal movie put to film but the director, Dusan Makavejev, sure didn't pull any punches. As I talk about the story, keep in mind that I'm not making this up. An oil millionaire is holding a beauty contest to find himself a virgin bride. It can't be just any virgin bride. She has to be willing to be urinated on by the millionaires golden penis which he proudly shows off in the film many times. No, folks, it's not a statue or anything, he just happens to have a gold penis. He finds the seemingly perfect bride but she doesn't take well to this lifestyle after awhile and runs away. She ends up in a large suitcase which ends up being shipped to France. Once there she still finds a life of weirdness and nothing but strange people. She eventually comes across a commune where a large number of people urinate all over each other and eat their own feces and rub it all over each others bodies. The story, if you can call it that, also involves a sailer and a girl named Capt. Ann who can't get enough sex. Eventually there is a love scene which takes place in a large tub of sugar which turns to a sticky red batter after being bloodied up by Ann stabbing her partner. Keep in mind this is all surrealism and perhaps a little of the directors sick self-indulgence. I only understood a little of what I saw after seeing one of the special features on the DVD. You really need to know a little about foreign politics of the 60's to understand the film which I don't. I get the feeling however that even with that education you will be scratching your head for a lot of the movie. Surprisingly, there is actually a decent soundtrack to the film as one of the songs heard was actually a hit in Europe and is quite nice. Keep in mind, this is not a sex film but uses it to attack us in an unsettling way. I promise you won't be turned on by any of those scenes. Although I can't say I really liked this film since I didn't find the entire thing interesting, I can say that it's a hard movie to be passive about because of the symbolism I actually did understand. Watch at your own risk!

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

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.