Welcome gentle readers to another installment of the Sunday Morning Movie. Today’s it’s a surrealist, absurdist comedy(?) called Sweet Movie. Not for the faint-hearted…
Sweet Movie (1974)
And here’s next week’s film, An Ideal Husband:
Reviews of Sweet Movie:
Roger Ebert says:
Dusan Makavejev’s “Sweet Movie” begins with what looks like a garden-variety National Lampoon function (an oil millionaire named Mr. Kapital is holding a global beauty contest to select himself a virgin bride) and develops into one of the most challenging, shocking and provocative films of recent years. Especially in its final 45 minutes, the movie presents almost pure experience. Makavejev shows us a commune where the members collectively immerse themselves in the fundamental processes of the body: eating, drinking, suckling, sex, vomiting, urinating, defecating, touching, screaming, hitting, caressing.
Makavejev doesn’t exploit this material — “Sweet Movie” is anything but a sex film — but uses it to confront us in a very unsettling way. The unasked questions behind his film seem to be: Well, we’re all human, aren’t we? This is what we are and what we do. What do you think of these people? You go to the movies to be entertained by scenes of people killing each other, you watch wars on TV — do the basic bodily processes of these people offend you?
Yes, they do, in a peculiar sense. Makavejev has an aggressive sense of texture and juxtaposition, and when he shows us characters making love in tons of sugar or writhing in a vat of chocolate, our sensual reactions are short-circuited. When one of the characters is first made love to in sugar, then stabbed to death so his blood stains the sugar and makes it sticky, we’re shocked and disquieted: Makavejev has made the movie violence more real, drawn our attention to the way we’re experiencing it, by presenting it in such an unexpected context. This is a movie we can’t be passive about. And although we can hate it, we can’t walk out of it.
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. Makavejev’s work (“Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator,” “Innocence Unprotected,” “WR: Mysteries of the Organism“) juxtaposes his subjects in such ways that they seem rotated several degrees from the real world. He considers Marxism, sex, violence, capitalism, political crimes and bizarre methods of personal contact in a way so radical and original that his movies are subversive of our everyday assumptions. He’s like a Bosch, making connections through hallucinations, deciding for himself what things look like.
Kinetoscope says:
A dirty joke masquerading as libertine battle hymn, Dušan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie corrupts the propriety of mid-century American advertising, perverting its candyshell colors and doe-eyed piety into a series of mordant provocations, succeeding in evoking anarchy, but failing as a treatise on subjective morality and epicureanism. Initial arguments made against opulence and cultural convention triumph as profane representations of privileged ignorance, but any ideological coherence is diluted by Makavejev’s penchant for shock, a technique that only functions when freed from artistic pretense and banal radicalism.
My take:
Where to begin? I’m not usually a fan of this kind of film. The nearest thing I can think of that reminds me of it is the work of John Waters, which was never my thing. Sweet Movie is intentionally, overtly provocative and that’s something I’m not a fan of. If you can’t let a story tell itself and you have to rely on sensationalism, you aren’t doing your job in my opinion. But upon reflection I guess that’s the point of the movie, to shock.
I did after all enjoy watching Sweet Movie, although parts of it were so gross (the banquet scene was so bad that the defecation scene seems tame) that I struggled to make it through. There is something, as one reviewer notes above, about the colors of the film that is attractive. It’s explosively colorful and it’s a good thing. The weirdness of the storylines is endearing somehow, instead of annoying as the overly absurd normally is for me. Still, I am awarding it a *, I’m glad I watched it but I won’t be back.
Note: there is an interview with the director on the Rarefilm page that may interest you, below the movie itself.
Director: Dušan Makavejev
Writer: Dušan Makavejev
Notable Actors: Carole Laure, John Vernon
Plot (Spoilers!):
Storyline 1:
Miss World Canada is awarded a choice prize: marriage to a milk tycoon. He turns out to be a bit too tightly wound and she rejects his advances. After torturing her, the tycoon has her kidnapped by his bodyguard who further mistreats her. She is then packed into a suitcase and shipped off to Paris for reasons unknown.
Then things get really weird. She makes love to a Mexican singer named “El Macho”. She is adopted into a commune of artists where she witnesses reenactments of a member’s birthing experience. Finally, she stars in a chocolate commercial wherein she is drowned in a vat of chocolate.
Storyline 2:
Anna Planeta is an odd duck. She is the captain of a boat laden with candy and with the head of Karl Marx on the prow, sailing down a Dutch canal. She picks up a stray sailor, makes love to him in a bed filled with sugar, then stabs him to death. She then lures children into her boat then apparently murders them too. Fortunately, when the police lay their plastic-bagged bodies on the side of the canal, the come back to life and emerge from the bags.
