HERE is a reminder about my rating system for these films
Hmmm so what torment is in store for me this week...
What is the movie about?
Sweet Movie is a cluster fuck of imagery and ideas. It never settles on anything long enough to do much of anything more than gross you out or make you wonder what is going on. It doesn’t help that a decent chunk of time you’ll be covering your eyes because there’s so much nasty shit in this flick.
I’ll do my best for you though, my readers, to best explain exactly what’s going on in this film. The best I could understand it there were two interchanging story lines. One involved a girl chosen by a rich bachelor to be his bride, but then is kicked out and finds herself traveling the world. The other story has a much less convoluted plot; a woman is captaining a boat filled with candy (and other things) around the world “protesting the war”. I will admit aside from some songs she sings I never really see her protesting anything except clothing. All this is very good, but still begs the eternal question…
Is the film disturbing?
Sweet Movie was almost the first film on this list that I almost shut off (ask bosh, he’ll confirm it). I’ve stated in previous entries that people have certain thresholds for disturbing imagery and my weakness is poop. I can handle so many terrible things in my movies, but show me someone pooping on a plate and celebrating it and I’m done. If the scatological scenes had been any longer I would have been shutting down this film.
Thankfully this is chocolate!
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg and I’m actually getting ahead of myself.
The main storyline follows a woman (whose name never seems to be given) who wins a virginity contest and the prize is getting hitched to the richest bachelor in the world. The film is quite ahead of its time, a televised contest where you get to marry a rich bachelor? What happens next though is not likely to have happened on the show. The bachelor scrubs his body and her (she was Miss Canada in the contest so I’ll call her that) body down with rubbing alcohol and then reveals he has a golden penis and pees on her. This is within the first ten minutes of the film, so you have a great idea were the film is going.
taking golden showers to a whole new level
Miss Canada’s story if rife with scat and nastiness that will sit with you for days (perhaps weeks). After the bachelor kicks her out she begins her travels with a large black man (named Jeremiah). He packs her into a suitcase and ships her off to France where she meets El Macho. They fuck in public under his cape and humorously wind up stuck. I forgot to mention that this is basically a comedy, yup a comedy and when it’s not shitting on screen it’s pretty damn funny. Eventually she finds herself with this weird hippy looking cult that, guess what, is shit based (ugh, more poop). She’s in a catatonic state when she gets there and they take some pretty wild chances at reviving her. They put her in a large basket and throw lettuce at her. Then they breastfeed her, thankfully if there’s anything this flick isn’t lacking is bare breasts. Granted, a lot of the time they are covered in some kind of substance (be it poop, chocolate, vomit…etc). When her story ends she’s back in the home of the rich bachelor doomed to either live in her personal hell or relive the whole ordeal over again.
OM NOM NOM
The other storyline involves a female boat captain ferrying a vessel from port to port “protesting” the war. The boat is fantastical, there’s a huge head on the front that I think is supposed to be Lenin. The boat is filled with candy and where ever she goes people seem to go out of their way to try to get on the ship. One such person is a naval officer that she dubs “Potemkin” who spends the majority of the film with her. The thing we discover is that she murders everyone that comes on the ship. She murders several little boys after performing a strip tease in front of them. Thankfully they don’t show the murders, but they do show the strip tease. As the film ends on her storyline she is arrested for murder and carted off, the bodies are left on the shore and they eventually awaken and stare up at the camera then the credits roll…it’s kind of creepy.
Spliced between these stories is documentary footage of the massacre in katyn forest. It’s not disturbing as such, but incredibly disgusting. This is real footage of real corpses from a real genocide. Needless to say it’s a little hard to watch. Remember the rest of this film is a comedy!
When Sweet Movie is over you’ll be questioning your sensibilities. You did just laugh at a guy pooping on a plate and dancing with it. It’s FUNNY! RIGHT? Depending on your style you may love Sweet Movie, but it’s just as easy to say you will hate it. It’s not an easy film to watch and may just have succeeded in damaging me permanently.
3 out of 5
Disturbitude: 9, WIN
Dusan Makavejev’s “Sweet Movie”/SWM (1976) is about two irreconcilable social strata our specie is fatally polarized on (paralyzed) – rich and poor (strong and weak, leaders and followers, deciders and the docile or the rebellious), about their psychology, so different and so unbreakably linked, and about their respective madness as a result of their permanent struggle and the impossibility of their unification. In other words, SWM is a film about the tragic impossibility of a real democracy in a too proud age of formal democracy. Makavejev analyzes two types of violence (that of the rich and that of the poor), coming as a consequence of the impossibility of a reconciliation between those on top and those on the bottom of the social hierarchy. According to the film, the violence of the wealthy (sovereigns) against the poor (the dependent ones) – triggers violence of the poor that sometimes surpasses that of the wealthy in its intensity and meaninglessness. By depicting the destiny of two protagonists, one with a conformist position towards the rich (Miss World, dreaming to exchange her virginity for marriage with a billionaire), and the other with a revolutionary position and sweet dream about a militant liberation of humankind (Anna Planeta moving about Europe on a ship with a giant smiling and crying figurehead of Karl Marx), Makavejev rejects the both attempts to solve the problem of inequality and injustice as sentimental and inadequate. While Miss World personifies the common superstitious idea that the poor can find life on the outskirts of wealth (in a condition that they will be persistent: hard working, in their efforts to get closer to its center), Anna Planeta personifies the two historical trends of rebellious resistance – the Soviet “socialist” (under the banner of Communism) and Western mass culture with its consumerism, freedom of sailing sales, pseudo-prosperity, sexual liberation and entertainment (as a “pragmatic” mini-Communism “equalizing” rich and poor in the utopia of general porous-prosperity). Makavejev’s directorial style in SWM is unique by a semantic distance between the intentional “juiciness” of his visual images and their meaning. Makavejev is a shock therapist of viewers’ blunted perception of the reality as a way to awaken their cognition. His aesthetic canon can be defined as anti-propaganda aesthetics, as a masterful undoing of what ideological propaganda, be it “socialist” or pseudo-democratic has done to human thinking. By Victor Enyutin
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