Description: Pushing his themes of sexual liberation to their boiling point, Yugoslavian art-house provocateur Dusan Makavejev followed his international sensation WR: Mysteries of the Organism with this full-throated shriek in the face of bourgeois complacency and movie watching. Sweet Movie tackles the limits of personal and political freedom with kaleidoscopic feverishness, shuttling viewers from a gynecological beauty pageant to a grotesque food orgy with scatological, taboo-shattering glee. With its lewd abandon and sketch-comedy perversity, Sweet Movie became both a cult staple and an exemplar of the envelope pushing of 1970s cinema.
Excess When I saw "Montenegro" all those years ago, it never really occurred to me that such a fantastic, idiosyncratic, and mysterious movie would actually come from a director that made other movies, too. It's just one of those things where each movie seems so ultimately different that it isn't feasible that there could be more of the same.
"Sweet Movie", to put it quite simply, is about excess. It's the story of two women, one a psychotic roaming candy-making pedophile boat woman, the other a delicate model/constant victim of sexual faux pas and impotency. The movie is filled with food, sex, and the gore that comes from food and sex. As the victimized woman finds herself in increasingly ridiculous situations and the psychotic woman puts people in others, many forms of abject art (revulsion/attraction, spewing and eating, killing and fornicating) keep a loaded bullet to the face of the viewer, mixed of course with a fair share of political asides and cultural themes (such as this: the fact that religious people appear scattered throughout the movie and are no more surprised by the activities of the characters than anyone else).
This movie falls squarely between something you'd expect from Alejandro Jodorowsky and Juzo Atami. Unlike Jodorowsky's work, however, the symbolism has a lot of weight, and unlike Atami, there's a lot more ambiguity. Dusan Makavejev is one of the most post-modern filmmakers out there, constantly asking questions that previously didn't exist, and then proving that there's no answer to them. This movie comes closer to a strong theme than "Montenegro", but it's full of a lot of self-awareness that purposefully deconstructs the very notion of "theme". (A Mariachi singer in Paris is filmed, and through distraction is shown to be lip-syncing. Later in the film he's actually supposed to be singing--and again is shown to be lip-syncing.)
In the end, it's hard to know what exactly to feel about this movie, minus revulsion for those of weak stomachs. It's both beautiful and intensely repulsive, which is a feat in either direction.
--PolarisDiB
Was going to purchase "Changed my mind" ... So i've been so curious lately on all of these films i had never really heard of before. I currently have 9 songs, Lie with me, Shortbus, Anatomy of Hell and The dreamers. Just recently purchased Solo and Fat girl. Only because i enjoy watching odd films at times.
I have been highly considering the purchase of "Sweet Movie" until now.
I read someone's 3 star review stating there is "emetophilia" in this movie ... i have a severe phobia with vomit, and something i would never want to purposely watch, especially in this manner.
How disgusting and Sick.
I do Thank that reviewer so very much for mentioning this and saving my money.
Thank you !!!
huh ????? I'm not sure what the people who reviewed this movie before me saw but watching this was just 90 min or so of my life that I will never get back It is a total waste on every level Do yourself a favor. Instead of watching this just go hit your head against a wall. It will take less time to get the same results
The Past of the Future; the Future of the Past The reviews I've read here for Makavejev's films all sadden me, but then, so do the films themselves, now. This is too bad, because Sweet Movie and WR both made me terribly happy and optimistic when I first saw them in art-house sixteen millimeter, and both have made the digital transition without significant loss. I note that a couple of the other reviewers remember scenes that have disappeared or been shortened. I also have vague feelings of loss, but am not so sure what's missing is in the film itself, or in the context.
Most of my own sadness comes from knowing how many of the participants in both projects are dead now. I can't help that, any more than other reviewers can help not knowing and not much caring. Partly that's because the two films (that blend into one over time) were so largely documentary, full of people playing themselves. All old art is a graveyard, but these films are like the home movies of a moment in left art culture, and have become Vanitas objects, in which the escapes from death that art and sex allow are drawn to their instructive conclusion.
What also saddens me is reading how many think these films were "experimental," and/or even continue to be "experimental" today. That was not and is not the case. They are much more theatrical than just about any "experimental" films of that time or of ours. It's easier to talk about them in Theater language than in Film language: they are mostly exercises in Brechtian epic theater, which has room within it for both documentary and real-life (real people just being themselves) inclusions. To people who had read Brecht, Boal (not in books yet then, but in articles), Grotowski or Peter Brook (lots of namedropping here but you're in Amazon so you can just look the books up now) none of the supposedly jarring shifts or shocking images were terribly jarring or shocking. To anyone brought up with the Germ Theory of Medicine as a kind of family religion, [...] play will always be an aesthetic frontier, no matter how many times you see it. But shock? Really?
The presence of documentary footage (exhumations at Katyn) and acted-out daily life (of the Muehl Commune) distances all the theatrical gore; it spreads the narrative space so there's lots of room for shifts back and forth, as text, countertext and gloss change places, lucky-pierre style. But again, that distancing is part of the normal equipment of sixties theater; something of which we'd all seen a lot (We had, hadn't we? Am I just making this up?) when these films first began touring the art houses and campus cinemas.
Maybe the best way to recuperate the past that's largely dead within these films (that doesn't make it bad; just dead) would be to translate them back into live theater. The Katyn footage could be projected onstage as an instructive cinema window into the past, as could the Reich footage that so irritates the Reichians by its presence in WR. Where to place the late Muehl Commune in representational space between art and life remains a puzzle, but the rest of both films sits comfortably within epic theater in its seventies version: the Berkeley Mime Troupe. A musical! A Broadway musical! Why not? LIke Hair, but with hair. One change I'd make, with which few would agree would be to replace the soulfully beautiful Ms. Laure (who has publicly regretted her work in this project, particularly the chocolate scene) with Karen Finley, thus bringing the performance forward in time, at least as far as the 1990's.
This will appeal mostly to curious lovers of bizarre art-house cinema. While typing this I still can't believe what I just watched and thankfully enough I had a couple of wine glass's to relax my senses. This movie is like all over the place but its essentially two inter-cut stories, but I can explain better by separating them two. Weirdly enough I'll start with the second story with a woman (Anna Prucnal) who helms a boat through the canals of Amsterdam with a bust of Marx on the bow. A sailor on a bicycle from the battleship Potemkin pursues her, as he wants to be her next lover. She is "revolution" and warns him that her lovers always die. While that is playing out, controversy occurs when she seduces several young children. Makevejev intercuts German footage of the uncovering of Polish victims of the Russian massacre at Katyn Forest. He contrasts Prucnal's victims with the dead Polish army.
In the primary plot line, a world beauty contest is held to find the most beautiful virgin in the world, who will become the bride of a rich Texas oilman (Dean Wormer!) who is obsessed with cleanliness. Miss Canada (Carole Laure) is the winner. The couple gets married and helicopters to his home. He undresses, scrubs her with alcohol, and then shows her his golden swhwartz, whereupon she starts screaming uncontrollably. Eventually, his overbearing mother sends her packing (literally packed into a suitcase) where she has adventures with a macho Mexican singer at the Eiffel Tower, but becomes increasingly withdrawn and mute, and ends up in the Otto Muehl Troupe commune. It is this section which earned the film's notoriety, as the troupe believes in a kind of therapy where we all get in touch with our base selves, and have monthly events where they target a member, and engage in overeating, public defecation and urination, debasement, etc. The film ends with an amazing nude bath in chocolate.
Despite the constant sexuality and shock value, few scenes are actually erotic. Director Makavejev has more on his mind than just sex, however. He spends a good deal of time on political satire. Some, like the Texas oilman sequence, is heavy-handed and cartoonish (though his vision of 1984 America and its sexual double standards, with the funding of the Chastity Belt Foundation, quite presciently anticipates Reaganite America). More fierce is his criticism of the Soviet denial of the Katyn Forest massacre, boldly using Nazi footage of the exhumations, then frequently disparaged as mere propaganda but now known to be the truth, to accuse the Russians of genocidal war crimes. Besides that "Sweet Movie" is clearly not for kids (though they like sugar), or even most adults, this is a movie only for those who want to have there buttons pushed.
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