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, Rovi
I didn't hate it, although it affected me in bewildering and sometimes unpleasant ways. I didn't find it a success, but I found it an audacious attempt, and it's filled with images impossible to forget.
Though much of the content is scandalous, the title is ultimately an accurate one -- the sensibility behind the images is innocent, enthusiastic, and childlike.
what happens on-screen during much of Sweet Movie is less a challenge to my worldview than it is confirmation that Makavejev is essentially shoveling what he's showing
This is not a film about which you can have mixed feelings. You either love it or loathe it; you are either on its wavelength or you feel assaulted by it. I stand in the latter category.
By turns hilarious and shocking, thanks to the director's penchant for startling imagery and bodily fluids, the passage of time may have deadened their effect but they still have the power to ruffle censorial feathers.
Another very weird movie from the 70s, there are three different stories included and just when you think one story is strange, the next one is even more outrageous. I liked the one about the lady and her candy boat, that could have been it's own movie. Overall, it's okay.
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.
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