Sweet Movie

1974 sweet movie

Rating: 13(?)/20

Plot: Spoilers abound! It's also disturbing, so you probably shouldn't even read it. It's the juxtaposed tales of a pair of women--Miss Canada, the winner of a virginity beauty pageant who, as a grand prize, marries a rich Texan, is urinated on by his golden phallus, attempts to leave, is taken to the inside of a water (milk?) tower by a muscular black man, watches him skipping rope while naked, has intercourse, is shoved in a suitcase, meets a Latino pop singer, has intercourse with him on the Eiffel Tower, flees to a commune where the participants of a vulgar banquet show off an array of bodily functions, and eventually writhes around in a tub of chocolate. The other woman pilots a candy-stuffed boat with a giant Karl Marx head on the front. She picks up a young man, has sex with him, seduces a bunch of children, and then kills them all. The end!

Finally, the movie I've been looking for--something a little bit more disturbing than Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. This is Dusan Makavejev, the same dude who directed Man Is Not a Bird, a pretty dull movie that went over my head during the notorious "man" movie streak. I'm not sure why I keep watching these Eastern European films from the 60s since I'm missing so much of the political context. I was born in a later decade and in another hemisphere and all. But hey, I almost got this one, seeing one of the woman as a representation of capitalism and the other as a symbol of revolution. It's a superficial reading, sure, and I don't know exactly what all the pooping and lip synching Spanish pop singers and Nazi documentary footage of a Russian massacre and grown men acting like babies and the blood/sugar/sex/magic and Battleship Potemkin allusions are all about. Unlike Man Is Not a Bird, this is anything but dull. It's wild and wildly unpredictable, not always in a positive way. It's challenging viewing, and, being the type of film that was banned pretty much everywhere, guaranteed to offend anybody who is even halfway decent. To me, the coprophilia, sexual depravities, and seduction of children is more shocking in this than in Salo because in this, it's all sugar-coated. This, much more than Pasolini's film, looks more like a movie packaged for the masses, more pop art than moody European drama, and your brain is just trained to expect a certain kind of images with colors that bright. It's also called Sweet Movie. I don't know if it was Makavejev's intent or what, but the bombardment of shocking imagery, after a while, started to feel a bit more comfortable. One early golden shower from a golden penis will bring out a "What the hell?" but the blow is lessened by the time you get to a scene where one man urinates into another man's mouth. Oh, who am I kidding? No, it isn't. That banquet stuff with avant-gardist Otto Muehl near the end is just disturbing in any context. But does it have artistic merit? I did like some of the set design, especially that funky boat and the collage work (the revolutionaries and pop icons pasted on the inner walls) inside. But yeah, I just don't know. I'm sure this movie is either a trashy masterpiece and much better than I think or just plain trashy and not nearly as good. Either way, I wouldn't recommend it to anybody, but it did make me think. About my movie choices.

And I kind of hope you didn't even bother reading this.