2/4  Sweet and Sour
Slightly less aggravating than a Jorodowsky movie, I can see how people would still be disgusted by Sweet Movie. Lots of sugar, spice, along with unbelievably humiliating torture that I can't begin to describe. I'm sort of in the middle. I... (read full)

5/5 Cult Movie Waiting To Find it's Cult
  by Wilhelm Louis Murg Jr. (Tulsa, Ok United States)
Dusan Makavejev's SWEET MOVIE is a masterpiece of outrageous cinema that falls somewhere between the disturbing surrealism of Buñuel and Dali's UN CHIEN ANDALOU, the ironically vibrant color that Lynch uses in the opening of BLUE VELVET, and the subversive dark humor and scatology of Water's PINK FLAMINGOS. I was intrigued with a review I read, then I discovered that it featured Otto Muehl, a mysterious artist and sexual offender who was featured in Amos Vogel's classic book FILM AS SUBVERSIVE ART - which I read 25 years ago while studying film in college.

Muehl filmed his "happenings" like a lot of people in the 1960s, but his "happenings" were like unfettered Id explosions of sex, bodily fluids, food and vomit. Just the stills in the books had something about them that made me realize this was the guy who took cinema right up to the edge in a free form that made Jean-Luc Goddard's films look like Hollywood blockbusters. These classic, seldom seen films can be viewed on Muehl's website.

SWEET MOVIE has two plots that kind of converge: First there is the Carole Laure, as Miss Canada, who wins a "beauty contest" where the women are screened by a gynecologist on stage to see if they are virgins. PULP FICTION fans should note that when the doctor looks at Laure's vaginal, it glows like the famous suitcase. The contest is staged by the mother of a wealthy milk tycoon (John Vernon). After a bizarre concept of foreplay, it is revealed that the tycoon has a golden penis. Laure freaks out so bad that the mother has a servant take her to a secret room where she is further humiliated, then stuffed into suitcase and sent off as luggage on a plane. A good chunk of the film follows this luggage bag going all over Europe.

Inter cut with these two stories is gruesome black and white documentary footage the Nazi's shot of the discovery of the mass graves from the Katyn massacre, where 21,000 people were Polish citizens were killed by the Soviets.

Meanwhile Anna Prucnal play the Captain of a ship filled with sugar and candy, and it also has a giant head of Karl Marx on the front of it. Makavejev's original concept was to have Marx's mouth in the water, so you couldn't tell if his was swimming or drowning, but when the boat was launched his who face was above the waterline. Prucnal picks up a sailor, Potemkin, in an obvious homage to Eisenstein's famous film of the same name. She warns that if she falls in love she will kill him. She also seduces three young boys, first with candy, then with a striptease in a scene that I'm not even sure you could legally film today - think TIN DRUM times three.

Meanwhile Laure finally finds herself at the Eiffel Tower where she meets "El Macho," a romantic singer who lip-syncs to old records. She is eventually taken in by Muehl's commune. After a dinner where everyone eats and then joyously throws up, I believe it is Muehl himself who is naked and pees on camera and a bucket of feces is poured on him as he screams and cries like a baby. Please note, I am not talking about special effects; he is peeing, and those are actual feces. Makavejev has noted that while that wasn't exactly what he was looking for, it was a collaboration between him and the infamous Muehl, so he left it in with all the ugliness.

The grand finale there are two of the most beautiful scenes in the history of cinema. The first is of Prucnal and Potemkin having sex in a bed of sugar, where she stabs him - lots of red on white in the shot - and buries him in the sugar. The second is, rather than feces, Laure is covered from head to toe in chocolate for a commercial and makes designs on her nude body with it.

The police stop the ship and have the bodies of the children Prucnal are discovered murdered. They are laid out in plastic body bags on the shore, which is edited with the bodies from the massacre being laid out in the same fashion. After all the black and white footage, the scene comes back to the children, who come to like and seem to be leaving their "cocoons."

I'm sure I'm missing some of the point, as this was made for a young audience behind the iron curtain 30 years ago, but I get enough to love the bizarre beauty of the film. Not only is it obviously subversive, a strange humor runs throughout the film, and it is beautiful. Makavejev wanted to make the film a "love letter to color film," and he succeeded in spades.

It's one of those films that's hard to describe in words; the poetic beauty and crazed comedy have to be seen to be understood. I would throw it in that group of films that dare to wallow in their own creativeness, no matter how alienating it might be to the general public, like the ANDY WARHOL'S FRANKENSTEIN, ANDY WARHOL'S DRACULA, HEAD, THE TRIP, BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE ULTRA-VIXENS, and even the subversive porn films like PARTY DOLL A GO GO or ULTRAFLESH. It's a cult movie looking for it's cult. If you got this far in the review; BUY IT!

-copyright Wilhelm Murg, 2009







5/5 from scatology to eschatology
  by fCh (GMT-5, USA)
I have to begin by admitting this is not an easy film to watch. To the regular viewer, the scatological overtones are gratuitous, to say the least. However, watching this film within its politico-temporal context, one can see that it is rather mis-characterized. Allow me to explain my journey in watching this film:

Like many of you, I decided to watch it just because Criterion put it out. I've known Yugoslav cinema to be rather colorful and did not mind a bit. As things started, I immediately saw the transparent pointers to cartoon-like representations of the US, Soviet Empire and even Western Europe for good measure, and the end-conclusion/state of each one of the systems. Alright, assuming the film was made in the '90s, I said to myself, "For the sake of completeness and honesty, where is the depiction of the Yugoslav tragedy?"

Indeed, post-WWII Yugoslavia had been an interesting historic anomaly. Its president, the Croat Iosip Broz Tito, who had won the best anti-fascist credentials leading the partisan fight from the mountains, managed to steer his country clear of the two major blocs on a third way. In other words, he was a socialist leader of a socialist country, within a socialist geography, who did not take orders from the Soviet bloc. Tito's Yugoslavs were enjoying most freedom--of thinking and movement--from all socialist countries. Then in 1991, 11 years after Tito passed away, Yugoslavia went up in flames. So, I'd have expected a bit of self-reflection from an Yugoslav director. Then, pausing briefly, I checked the production date and was stunned to see it was turned in 1974.

To put things in perspective, in 1974, the Cold War was going strong, Richard Nixon resigned as President of the United States, and Solzhenitsyn was deported From Russia. Now, why is this last point relevant? Because, before Solzhenitsyn made it to the West, large numbers in the western intelligentsia had been pro-Soviet, going as far as denying the atrocities perpetrated in the name of communism. So, you can imagine, it took a talented Yugoslav director, and a visionary in many ways, to say it all in "Sweet Movie," as we all have come to witness at high speed as we entered the 1990s. Yes, hear from any former subject of (East European) socialism and "eating s*h*i*t" was an usual metaphor describing the official discourse. Yes, many young and idealist had been figuratively drawn in by the sugar of, and then devoured by, the Socialist Revolution orchestrated by Moscow. And, yes, here in the west, a lot from what we do is put a mask on things to sell more/better.

So, unless one can watch this film taking into account its context, Dusan Makavejev and his "Sweet Movie" will get maligned. Context accounted for, this is an important document that stands the test of time and art. Yes, this can be art, the type that calls for attention not to itself but to the greater dangers we face as society at one point or another. Scatology is a means to militant art. In fact, Makavejev turns scatology into eschatology, and so should the viewer.

5/5 Disturbingly erotic and erotically disturbing...
  by T. Youmans (kansas city, mo, usa)
Sweet Movie is like the crack baby of Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom - Criterion Collection and Pink Flamingos. With such a surreal quality to it, Sweet Movie keeps you glued to the screen no matter how disturbing the subject matter may be. Interlaced between all of Sweet Movie's disturbing images are stock footage of Nazi medical experimentation which blur the lines of the movie's fictional degredation with real life human barbarianism, which takes away the ability to say its just a movie.
Before giving the impression that Sweet Movie is a pure exploitation film with the singular goal of offending the viewer's senses, I must add that it is at the same time a powerful and beautiful film, with bizarre imagery and situations. But it is still pretty messed up.
I recommend this movie to anyone with a strong stomache and an interest in arthouse/exploitation cimema. And if the content in the movie doesn't bother you, like some reviewers have noted, then congratulations, you've reached a greater point of desensitization than I have.

3/5 Excess
  by PolarisDiB (Southwest, USA)
When I saw "Montenegro" all those years ago, it never really occurred to me that such a fantastic, idiosyncratic, and mysterious movie would actually come from a director that made other movies, too. It's just one of those things where each movie seems so ultimately different that it isn't feasible that there could be more of the same.

"Sweet Movie", to put it quite simply, is about excess. It's the story of two women, one a psychotic roaming candy-making pedophile boat woman, the other a delicate model/constant victim of sexual faux pas and impotency. The movie is filled with food, sex, and the gore that comes from food and sex. As the victimized woman finds herself in increasingly ridiculous situations and the psychotic woman puts people in others, many forms of abject art (revulsion/attraction, spewing and eating, killing and fornicating) keep a loaded bullet to the face of the viewer, mixed of course with a fair share of political asides and cultural themes (such as this: the fact that religious people appear scattered throughout the movie and are no more surprised by the activities of the characters than anyone else).

This movie falls squarely between something you'd expect from Alejandro Jodorowsky and Juzo Atami. Unlike Jodorowsky's work, however, the symbolism has a lot of weight, and unlike Atami, there's a lot more ambiguity. Dusan Makavejev is one of the most post-modern filmmakers out there, constantly asking questions that previously didn't exist, and then proving that there's no answer to them. This movie comes closer to a strong theme than "Montenegro", but it's full of a lot of self-awareness that purposefully deconstructs the very notion of "theme". (A Mariachi singer in Paris is filmed, and through distraction is shown to be lip-syncing. Later in the film he's actually supposed to be singing--and again is shown to be lip-syncing.)

In the end, it's hard to know what exactly to feel about this movie, minus revulsion for those of weak stomachs. It's both beautiful and intensely repulsive, which is a feat in either direction.

--PolarisDiB

1/5 Was going to purchase "Changed my mind" ...
  by sweet-one (Casselberry)
So i've been so curious lately on all of these films i had never really heard of before. I currently have 9 songs, Lie with me, Shortbus, Anatomy of Hell and The dreamers. Just recently purchased Salo and Fat girl. Only because i enjoy watching odd films at times.

I have been highly considering the purchase of "Sweet Movie" until now.

I read someone's 3 star review stating there is "emetophilia" in this movie ... i have a severe phobia with vomit, and something i would never want to purposely watch, especially in this manner.

How disgusting and Sick.

I do Thank that reviewer so very much for mentioning this and saving my money.

Thank you !!!