Whether the title refers to candy or flowing sexual juice of one kind or another, or perhaps an emission (like vomit or feces) from some other part of the human anatomy, Dušan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie presents a feast of pleasures—and its opposite. To paraphrase Cole Porter: “It’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s disgusting!” To quote Alfred Hitchcock: “Ingrid, it’s just a movie.”
At least we’re spared the sight of the growing and growing erection with which his W.R.—Mysteries of the Organism (1971) assaults us. But, to paraphrase George M. Cohan, Makavejev would still “rather be Reich.”
The film goes back and forth between joint protagonists, two women who occupy different worlds (both ours, the film insists), one an introvert, the other an extrovert, one passive, the other aggressive, one objectified by guys, the other objectifying them. The former, we learn, takes a punch and fits (we imagine, uncomfortably) inside a suitcase; the latter dispenses candies that are, in one way or another, ruinous to more than a guy’s teeth. If my prose sounds flippant, it fits the tone of Makavejev’s comedic parable. Feminist or misogynist? Well, politically one and behaviorally the other.
I love Makavejev’s Man Is Not a Bird (1965) and Innocence Unprotected (1968), and I have a happier time with Montenegro (1981) than I do with Sweet Movie. But Sweet Movie is the unadulterated one, the acid test for determining who is a weekend Makavejevite, who a real Makavejevite.
Call me Monday morning.
Tags: east european cinema
July 18, 2008 at 5:19 am |
This is a great one. I was somewhat disappointed in W.R., probably because from people’s descriptions I was expecting something more like this — in its messiness and disgustingness Sweet Movie is also incredibly fun. Makavejev seems to take real joy in these depictions of scatological spirituality and sexual extremism, even as he satirizes both East and West alike. He suggests that the solution to overbearing politics of various ideological stripes is to free the Id and get in touch with a more physical than cerebral humanity.
My own thoughts on the film are here:
http://seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com/2007/10/1024-i-am-curious-yellow-sweet-movie.html#i2