SWEET MOVIE (1974, Dusan Makavejev) 

Yugoslaslavian-born director Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie was the succes de scandal at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival (much like Cronenberg's Crash was in 1996). It provoked much outrage at Cannes, and at its US premiere in New York in October 1975, it was met with even more vociferous attacks. Even after four minutes were cut it was declared "a social disease" by Time magazine. Vincent Canby called it "elitist", grudgingly admitting it was a courageous body of work but over his head. Two scenes in particular proved troublesome for viewers and critics (and still do) - a protracted sequence featuring extreme performance artist Otto Muehl's troupe; and a scene where a lead character, Anna Planeta (Anna Prucnal), seduces a group of underaged boys.

Makavejev intercuts two discontinuous narratives throughout Sweet Movie: one concerns an unnamed Canadian woman (Carol Laure) who wins a contest to find the virginal beauty possessing the world's most perfectly formed hymen. The contest is televised by the Crazy Daisy Show, whose host introduces the proceedings (and, appropriately, the film) as "a window into reality... a breath of cold air from another world". Miss Canada's prize for becoming 'Miss World 1984' is marriage to the world's wealthiest bachelor, Aristotlese Aplanalp AKA "Mr. Kapital" (John Vernon). After a traumatic honeymoon in which she's ritually swabbed head to toe with rubbing alcohol and then urinated on by the groom's gold-plated member before he deflowers her (though it's left unclear as to whether he actually does), Miss World is then passed on by Martha Aplanalpe, Kapital's mother (Jane Mallet), to musclebound genius Jeremiah (Roy Callendar). Jeremiah ships her off inside a suitcase to Paris, where she trysts with preening mariachi-singing superstar El Macho (Sami Frey), after a music video shoot at the Eiffel Tower. Complications arise from the coupling that require medical attention, however, and after El Macho is on his way, Miss World eventually makes her way to The Milky Way Commune (portrayed by a real-life radical therapy/ performance art group led by arch-provocateur Muehl; Marpessa Dawn and Anna Prucnal, in her second role in the film, also play Commune members), where the group's taboo-shattering brand of therapy seemingly hurls her into a complete fugue state.

The film's second narrative strand involves Captain Anna Planeta (Prucnal, in the more prominent of her two roles), a revolutionary Communist prostitute who travels the world in a ship, the Survival - its bow bearing a stolid likeness of Karl Marx, and its hold filled with candy and corpses. She picks up a Russian sailor, Luv Bakunin (Pierre Clemeti) and his pet mouse. Luv has seemingly wandered through time on his bicycle from decades earlier - he is apparently the last survivor of Eisenstien's Battleship Potemkin. Luv and Anna begin a passionate affair, bound by their revolutionary fervor. But Anna's ship is full of secrets unknown to Bakunin. With the promise of sweets and sex, Anna soon lures four young boys to their deaths and later slays Luv in a vat of sugar.

Intercut with the two stories is footage from a Nazi documentary depicting the examination of hundreds of Polish corpses. At the film's close, Makavejev brilliantly juxtaposes this footage with the fates of his two heroines, conveying a chilling vision of Communist revolution as it succumbs to the decay and perverse hope of late capitalism.

Makavejev had directed WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), a part-fictional, part-documentary film linking the life and ideals of radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich with Makavejev's own take on the Communist Revolution, just before Sweet Movie. Sweet Movie is almost WR through a mirror darkly, taking Makavejev's communist/ capitalist dialectic to its terminus, using Reichian motifs (though not as explicitly as in the prior film) to illustrate his concerns. But Makavejev cloaks his deeper meanings and transgressive intent in surrealistic parody. Sweet Movie is a tour de force of lunacy, maintaining its outrageous frisson from start to finish, and provokes and entertains on multiple levels. Simply put, it may be disturbing at times, but it's never boring.

The Otto Muehl sequence proved to be the most controversial aspect of the film. It contains the film's most graphic shots, and while no doubt a test for weaker stomachs, this portion of the film is the most extreme expression of Makavejev's Reichian ideals. Through body play, infantile regression, and demystification of all bodily fluids and functions, The Milky Way Commune purges itself of guilt and repression and, unlike our tortured heroines, finds redemptive power in the Body Politic. Muehl's antics in Sweet Movie pale before his real-life escapades, captured in an intense series of underground art films that, after many years, remain very difficult to see. Muehl's materialaktionen movement set the standard for extreme performance art, and his films are as artistically accomplished as they are deeply unsettling. His work was the perfect over-the-top actualization of Reichian tenets to attract Makavejev. Carol Laure's traumatic reaction to Muehl's commune was the culmination of her growing disgust with the film, and she dropped out of the movie before all of her scenes could be shot. Originally, hers was to be the sole lead character, and Miss World's ordeals were to transform her into a radical revolutionary. Laure's departure necessitated Makavejev creating the parallel Anna Planeta storyline. As it stands, the picture is all the stronger and more distinctive due to this unplanned dualism: if Anna Planeta is a twisted take on WR's "ideal" communist Milena, then Miss World embodies the excesses of late capitalism.

Makavejev assembled a terrific cast for Sweet Movie: Prucnal (Fellini's City of Women); Frey (Godard's Band of Outsiders); Clementi (Bunuel's Belle de Jour); Dawn (Camus' Black Orpheus); Vernon (Boorman's Point Blank); and loveable Leonide the mouse, who Makavejev bills above Vernon! And lastly, from a film so critically reviled, Carol Laure, who truly gives it her all in Sweet Movie, went on to star in Bertrand Blier's Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1978.

I would contend that Sweet Movie is among the most misunderstood films ever made, but need great art always be understood? Certainly not. There is, however, a method to Makavejev's madness, as surely as there's madness in his method. I would highly recommend Sweet Movie to anyone who wants to see a film that's truly unique and original - there simply is nothing else like it. And you can't say that about many films. But brace yourself - it's a breath of cold air from another world.


Henry Covert

(portions of this review originally appeared in the magazine Video Eyeball, Vol 3, No. 2, 1998)