Themes: Political Unrest, Sexual Awakening, Innocence Lost
Main Cast: Carole Laure, Pierre Clémenti, Anna Prucnal, Sami Frey, Jane Mallet
Release Year: 1974
Country: CA/FR
Run Time: 99 minutes
Plot
Like his WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Dusan Makavejev's controversial 1974 feature Sweet Movie is firmly rooted in the principles of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. In cinematic terms, this means bombarding the audience with an onset of imagery so visceral, disgusting and repellent that it "awakens" the viewer in a Brechtian manner by "short-circuiting" the audience's reactions. Sweet Movie interweaves two narratives. One begins with a trip to the "Miss World Virginity Contest," whose winner, Miss Monde 1984 (Carole Laure) is auctioned off to Mr. Kapital (Animal House's John Vernon), a Texas oil billionaire with an odd perversion. Instead of deflowering her on her wedding night, he sterilizes the terrified girl's body with rubbing alcohol and showers her in urine with his massive gold-plated penis, while an audience watches bemusedly through his bedroom window. She later escapes from her bridegroom, in a suitcase, and winds up at a wild Viennese commune whose participants indulge in public defecation and a food orgy that wraps with a massive display of gurgling, yakking, and vomiting. At the tale's conclusion, Miss Monde shoots a television commercial that involves writhing nude in a giant vat of chocolate, with which she is completely drenched from head to toe, as the cameras roll. The second story involves a woman, Anna Planeta (Anna Prucnal) piloting a candy-filled boat down a river, with a massive papier-mache head of Lenin on the prow and a lover in-tow who is a refugee from the Battleship Potemkin. She eventually does a seductive striptease and seduces a pack of children, then makes love to her paramour in a vat of sugar and stabs him through the heart. Throughout the film, Makavejev includes shock cuts to Nazi autopsy footage and medical experimentation footage, some of which involves physical abuse of infants under the guise of "baby gymnastics." Although it has its admirers, Sweet Movie is something of an acquired taste. And that's putting it kindly. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide
John Vernon - Mr. Kapital; Louis Bessieres; Marpessa Dawn - Mama Communa; Robin Gammell; Sabine Haudepin; Catherine Sola; Max Fischer; Roland Topor; Sonny Forbes; Denis Boucher; George Melly; Otto Muehl
Sweet Movie (1974) is a film by the Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev, following his 1971 W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism. The film follows two women: a Canadian beauty queen, who represents a modern commodity culture, and a captain aboard a ship laden with candy and sugar, who is failed communist revolutionary. Director of photography is Pierre Lhomme. The film's music is from Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis.
One narrative follows Miss Monde 1984/Miss Canada (Carole Laure), who wins a contest of the "most virgin"; her prize is the marriage to a milk industry tycoon (John Vernon). However, following his degrading puritanical introduction to intercourse, she vents her intention to leave to her mother-in-law who, at that point, nearly has her killed. The family bodyguard takes her away, further humiliates, and finally packs her in a trunk bound for Paris. She finds herself on the Eiffel Tower, where she absently meets and has intercourse with a Latin singer, El Macho (Sami Frey). The sexual act is interrupted by touring nuns who frighten the lovers into bulbus glandis. In her post-coital shocked state, she is adopted an artist community led by Otto Muehl, where she finds affectionate care. The commune practices some liberating sessions, where a member, with the assistance of the others, goes through a (re)birth experience, cries, urinates and defecates like a baby, while the others are cleaning and pampering him. Later she is seen acting for an obscene advertisement, in which she is naked, covered in liquid chocolate.
The second narrative involves a woman, Anna Planeta (Anna Prucnal) piloting a candy-filled boat down a river, with a big papier-mache head of Karl Marx on the prow. She picks up the hitchhiking sailor 'Potemkin' (Pierre Clémenti), though warns him if she falls in love, she will kill him. He ignores her many suggestions for him to leave and their relationship evolves. Eventually, in the state of love making, she stabs him to death in their nidus of sugar. She also seduces children into her world of sweets and revolution. She is eventually apprehended and arrested by the police who lay down plastic sacks containing the children's bodies on the riverside, implying they too have been killed by Planeta. The film ends with the children, unseen by the others, being reborn from their plastic cocoons.
Reception
The film created a storm of controversy upon its release. With simulated (and unsimulated) scenes of coprophilia, emetophilia, fondling, and footage of remains of the Polish Katyn Massacre victims. The film was banned in many countries, or severely cut. It is still banned in many countries to this day. The film was nearly impossible to find since its initial release in 1974, but Criterion released the film on DVD in a region 1 DVD on June 19, 2007.
