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Released by: Criterion Collection
Released on: 6/19/2007
Director: Dusan Makavejev
Cast: Carole Laure, Pierre Clementi, Anna Prucnal
Year: 1974
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The Movie:
Croatian filmmaker Dusan Makavejev's follow up to his Wilhelm Reich inspired WR: Mysteries Of The Organism was 1974's Sweet Movie, a film which eschewed most (though not all) of the earlier film's sex as energy theorizing in favor of a viciously barbed skewering the politics of eastern Europe of the day.
When the film begins, a beautiful woman known only as Mademoiselle Canada (Carole Laure, who would soon disown the film and want nothing to do with it) wins a beauty contest after she's found to have the most impressive vagina out of all the contestants. Her prize? She gets to marry a ridiculously wealthy man named Mr. Dollars (John Vernon) but after a helicopter ride over Niagara Falls, her wedding night takes a turn for the bizarre when he rubs her down with sanitizer, unleashes his gold covered phallus and proceeds to piss all over her. She immediately wants a divorce but his cronies make sure that'll never happen by sending her off to Europe where she arrives, naked, inside a suitcase and almost immediately makes love with a Spanish singer-actor named El Macho (Sami Frey) who is in the midst of filming atop the Eiffel Tower. Unfortunately, their tryst is interrupted by touring nuns and the shock leads to her muscles contracting to such a point that she can't get off of him. Eventually she winds up at a commune where the inhabitants go through a physical rebirthing ceremony involving all the pissing, puking and shitting you'd expect from a bunch of newborns but before her story ends we'll see her essentially masturbating (or coming damn close to it) in a vat of chocolate while cameras roll in front of her and capture every detail.
While Mademoiselle Canada is dealing with her plight, a young sailor named Luv (Pierre Clémenti) with Potemkin embroidered on his hat hitches a ride on a boat that passes by while he's urinating into a river. The boat's captain, a former Communist revolutionary named Anna Planeta (Anne Prucnal), takes a liking to him and they make love and he hangs out for a while, despite her warning that her boat (which sports a carved masthead of a crying Karl Marx) is full of corpses. As their relationship evolves to a certain extent, she brings him into the hold for a bizarre tryst in a tray full of sugar but not before she seduces and kills a few young boys in a scene that has kept the film banned in Britain to this day.
Made outside of his native country in France and Canada, Dusan Makavejev's film is a disturbing one that paints Stalin's twisting of Marx's original political theorizing as rightfully evil and as little more than a way for a government to exploit its populace. It also takes some well aimed and entirely deserved potshots at the evils of capitalism, particularly in how it portrays Mademoiselle Canada as nothing more than a possession. When successful businessman Mr. Dollars talks to her about how he needs her as nothing more than a receptacle for his waste, it's pretty obvious how the filmmaker feels about big business' abuse of the common people. Mademoiselle Canada, however, is just as greedy in many ways, immediately calling for alimony and claiming his mansion as her own as soon as the word 'divorce' is uttered.
The controversial scenes of bodily excretions, which are shown in unflinching detail and lead by none other than infamous bizarre-world artist Otto Muehl (also a convicted child molester, though this was long after the film was made), are just as shocking as the film's reputation would have you believe. They pack a strong punch and aren't the least bit pleasant to watch, however they do succeed in shocking the audience, as do the black and white insert shots showing the atrocities committed by the Soviet's against Poland in the infamous Katyn Forest massacre. Throw in the aforementioned scene in which Anna seduces a few young boys, a scene which doesn't involve any genital contact but which does come close and which remains quite unsettling, and you've got a film that really rubs your face in some truly unsightly material. There is, however, a point to it all and this is what keeps the film from falling into the exploitation pit. The political potshots, which the extra features cover quite well, are deserved and if Makavejev's way of making his point is a bizarre and often times very disturbing one, so be it. The contrast between the horrors we see acted out and the horrors we see documented in the inserts really says it all and reminds us that while movies can be controversial and unsettling, they pale in comparison to the true horrors that the world contains and reminds us that, even more than thirty years later, they haven't gone away.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Criterion's 1.66.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is a good one. Properly flagged for progressive scan playback, the image quality is strong throughout. There's a bit of mild print damage and some shots look grainier than others but colors are strong without looking artificially boosted and detail levels are very good. Black levels are good and while skin tones have been intentionally played with a bit here and there, sharpness and contrast look dead on. There aren't any problems at all with compression artifacts, edge enhancement or aliasing and the transfer probably looks as good as the elements could realistically allow for.
Sweet Movie was shot with different performers speaking different languages - English, French, Polish, Italian and Croatian are all used in the movie, and subtitles are offered in English. The audio quality of the Dolby Digital Mono track is fine. Some scenes are spoken rather softly but not to the point where it's really a detriment. Dialogue is generally quite well balanced with the scenes in which various characters sing sounding surprisingly strong. There are no problems with hiss or distortion to complain about and generally things sound just fine here.
Extras are a bit slim by the standards of some of Criterion's other releases but there's still a fair bit to dive into as far as the supplements on this disc are concerned, starting with a twenty-two minute interview with writer/director Dusan Makavejev conducted by Peter Cowie in 2006. This is a pretty interesting look at just what exactly Makavejev was trying to accomplish with this film. He discusses where some of the ideas came from, censorship problems that the film not surprisingly ran into, using the child actors in the notorious seduction scene, his influences, and of course, the film's politics. A commentary might have been a better way for Makavejev to explain his motivation and his experiences working on this particular movie, but the interview is an excellent substitute.
Complimenting the first interview quite well is a twenty-minute discussion with Dina Iordanova, a Professor of Film Studios at St. Andrew's University and an expert on Balkan cinema. Here she elaborates on the political imagery and provides some very welcome context for much of the anarchy we see and explains them in such a way that westerners are able to grasp them. This is a pretty invaluable key to deciphering much of what Makavejev shows us in the film.
Rounding out the extras on the disc is a four minute clip from a French television show in which Anna Prucnal talks about how her work on this picture got her banned from Poland before launching into a rendition of the song she sings in the film (with lyrics rewritten by none other than Pasolini), menus, and chapter stops. Inside the keep case is a full color booklet featuring credits for the film, credits for the DVD and essays on the film from authors David Sterritt and Stanley Cavell.
The Final Word:
A scathing critique of eastern European political misdirection, fascist leanings and capitalist greed, Makavejev's Sweet Movie certainly isn't a film that everyone will enjoy but it is a fascinatingly confrontational movie that succeeds in not only shocking its audience but in making it think as well. Criterion's DVD looks and sounds as good as you could hope and thankfully includes some enlightening extra features as well that succeed in putting the film into its proper cultural and historical context. A very well rounded package for a very unusual film.