User Reviews

Right off the top - I have no idea what the hell this film is about. I can't give it a proper rating as I don't know what it is I just watched. Is it some sort of political statement? A strange comedy? A fetish film? I surely don't know - all I can say is it's pretty f!cked-up - and I watch A LOT of f!cked-up sh!t...

I can't really say if there's a "narrative" to the film - it starts with some kind of virginity contest that a beautiful Canadian wins - as the winner she marries some billionaire with a golden cock. When she sees his dong she flips out and wants a divorce but apparently that can't happen so some huge black dude bones her then karate-chops her, puts her in a suitcase and flies her somewhere else where she meets some Spanish guy, bones him and they get literally stuck together. At the same time that all this strangeness is going on - a bunch of freaks in a boat with Karl Marx's head on the front of it do a bunch of weird stuff. Eventually the whole film becomes a blur as it descends (courtesy of Otto Muehl and the Vienna Aktionists) into a strange fetishistic mess of scat and urine, borderline pedophilia, puke-play, and all other manner of weirdness. The whole thing ends with an arousing scene of Miss Canada rolling around nekkid by herself in chocolate syrup...

I guess I'm not "high-brow" enough to get this type of thing, cuz I surely can make no sense of it. I neither liked it nor disliked it - it just was what it was. If you like super-strange "art-house" style films - give this one a shot. If not - don't bother...

What is it - a satire on social and sexual politics, government sponsored genocide, democracy for Eastern Europe and the stereotypes of the times? Or non-connected collection of shocking images that include "virgin beauty contest" the winner of which would marry a billionaire, Mr. Kapital (John Vernon) with golden penis; an intercourse in Eiffel Tour that ends up with a spasm; a dinner party with the members of Viennese commune Friedrichshof, a revolutionary/ siren /vampire, Anna Planeta who sails a riverboat with a huge Karl Marx head on its bow on the canals of Amsterdam and lures men and young boys aboard with her seductive songs for sex, candies, and death? "Sweet Movie" is all that and it shocks you even more, and I think it is a good and deep movie. It is extremely disturbing and it really tests its viewers on how much and for how long they would endure watching some of very disgusting stuff but everything what happens on screen does make sense and does prove the writer/ director's many points. Actually, first hour or so is a wild and funny surreal black comedy/satire of which my most beloved filmmaker Don Luis Bunuel would be proud.

The two scenes closer to the end really push all possible envelopes. After I found out that the participants in the "commune" scene were actually the real members of Friedrichshof, the Viennese commune that had been founded and run by artist/filmmaker/painter Otto Meuhl, and everything we see is pretty much real, I was shocked even more. Dusan Makavejev explains in the interview on the Criterion disc who the people are and why they engage in the shocking activities. From what I understood, the acts of people urinating on each other, indulging in emetophilia, coprophilia, were the part of Wiener Aktionismus or Viennese Actionism, the Art movement which is remembered for the willful transgressiveness of its naked bodies, destructiveness and violence. Makavejev added that what those people were doing to themselves and one another was also a part of the group therapy. Whatever it was, I had to fast-forward some of the scene.

The most disturbing and important scene in the movie (and it is often overlooked by the viewers and critics) is a real footage of the 1943 discovery of mass graves at Katyn Forest by Germany, after its armed forces had occupied the big European part of the former USSR in 1941.

From Wikipedia: "The term "Katyn massacre" originally referred to the massacre, at Katyn Forest near villages of Katyn and Gnezdovo (about 12 miles (19 km) west of Smolensk, Russia), of Polish military officers confined at the Kozelsk prisoner-of-war camp in 1940. Estimates of the number of executed persons ranges from 15,000 to 21,768."

The Soviet Union continued to deny responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when Mikhail Gorbachev in his attempt to openness, acknowledged that the NKVD (People Committee of Internal Affairs, later known as KGB - Committee of State Security) secret police had in fact committed the massacres and the subsequent cover-up. The Russian government has admitted Soviet responsibility for the massacres, although it does not classify them as war crimes or as acts of genocide. Including the footage of the war crimes of such scale that were completely unknown to the West during the high point of the Cold War, and trying to get attention to those crimes and acknowledge their victims, was a courageous act from Makavejev. As he said in the end of his interview - as long as we remember the ones who died, they are not dead.

Reading the reviews and comments about "Sweet Movie", I realized that some posters were puzzled and somehow confused with the "revolutionary" part of the story that involves Anna Planeta and her killing boat. Since I also "came in from the Cold", like Dusan Makavejev did, his many references to the history of Eastern Europe of the last century, including two World Wars, and Revolutions, make a lot of sense to me. For those who want to learn more, I highly recommend watching featurette with the film scholar Dina Lordanova. This 20 minutes long documentary may help you to understand better what is behind all the shocking imagery and what Makavejev wanted to say. I already mentioned interview from 2006 with the director/writer which is very interesting. The last featurette presents Anna Prucnal who talks about the impact "Sweet Movie" made in her life and she sings the song "The Urchins Down In the Meadow" in Italian (it is performed in Greek in the movie during the Katyn Forest scene). Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote the Italian lyrics for the song.

Senior Pasolini, I think I am ready for your movie now.

It's almost virtually impossible tracking down a copy of this film since both the Facets VHS went out of print and the Brazilian DVD release too. Finally after months of being on an amazon.com waiting list, I checked Ebay and 1 copy was available. "Sweet Movie" is very bizarre, surreal, funny and at times disgusting. It's like Alejandro Jodorowky and John Waters teamed up to make a film. There are so many strange images in this film, I can't even remember everything I witnessed. The story concerns a girl who enters a virginity pageant and wins. She marries a rich oil tycoon with a golden penis. She doesn't want to stay with him, so he has a muscular man pack her in a suitcase and ship her to Paris. There she meets a Spanish singer, and they have sex in public and get stuck together. At the same time another lady by the name of Anna Planet is on a Marxist ship, she gets kinky with a sailor and kills him while having sex in a pile of sugar. She also uses candy to seduce children. Although she strips in front of the kids, and this scene is extremely uncomfortable to watch; Makavejev leaves the sex off screen as the kid goes behind a curtain. Miss Virginity (Carol Laure) is not so virgin like now, as she joins the strange anarchist sex antics of The Vienna Aktionists. This is when the film starts to become repulsive. They urinate on each other, smear feces on one another, vomit, dance naked and many other depraved acts. Then later we see actress Carol Laure masturbating in a vat of chocolate. Although "Sweet Movie" sounds disgusting, it's actually pretty funny. In the first part I was laughing, in the second part gasping. To top it all off it's somewhat a musical! I can't get the theme song out of my head. "Is there life on the earth?, Is there life after birth?" (sing it with me) "Sweet Movie" is a very important work of world cinema. It is a revolutionary Marxist sex comedy, so to speak. It's also "finger licking good"!

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

what can i say? its like a wannabe salò meets some of the worst 80's era Jess Franco with a little bit of "we've all heard it before politics". The plot makes no sense whatsoever, the pacing is super slow, it tries way too hard to shock with dumb and pointless scenes, such as the vomiting pooping banquet orgy thing.And oh the sex on sugar scene insults my intelligence. To be fair the first 20 or so minutes were fairly entertaining and funny , but after that i just got bored.

Here it is, I have finally seen a movie that I can set a new standard for. A movie that would have not affected my opinion of it, no matter where it began or ended, a movie loaded with subtext but no cohesive development, a movie that… dare I say does not even deserve the honor of being called one! A movie where about 20 minutes through it, I had to exclaim, `We have a winner!' `For what?' you may ask. `Why,' I would say, `The title for Worst film ever!!!' This is a movie where the only intent is to disgust, and frankly, I deserve a gold medal for sitting through this one. Sweet Movie, more or less follows this outline: A woman wins the title of `Miss Virginity' and is whisked away to Niagara Falls by John Vernon. John Vernon exposes his gold platted penis to her (and our) horror and escapes in a suitcase to the Eiffel tower where she makes love to a rock star, gets a love cramp, and eventually boards a ship of yahoos who vomit, defecate, and urinate for our pleasure while a woman kills a sailor from the Battleship Potemkin (yes, that Battleship Potemkin) in a vat of sugar. Then a lot of people get arrested, and the movie ends. Throughout this film there is a lot of discussion about Russian politics, sexual proletarianism, there's stock footage, at least one historical quote, and that's about the extent of it. I think if they were going to make a point, then the least they could do was not make the surface material too distracting. I'll never make the mistake of watching another one of Makavejev's movies. This man should be barred from making another movie…..again!

Back in the days when I was a sapling - by which I mean I was still developing and the sap was constantly on the rise - I was always up for a good Art film. This was because it was the late 60s, and it was a good bet that I would find something in an Art film which wasn't easily available elsewhere, namely moving images of naked women. The endless quest for naked women, though not yet extinguished, has abated somewhat over the years, and I am now better able to assess Art films without such matters obscuring my judgement. And my conclusion is as follows: some of them are, indeed, art, but many of them represent their maker following a particular vision which is not necessarily obviously apparent to the audience. I am not a deep person, obscure visions do not suddenly reveal themselves in clarity to me, and Art films therefore frequently strike me as pretentious rubbish.

Dusan Makavejev has certainly been among the trailblazers of personal visions, and that is the case here. I do not have the vaguest idea what he is trying to convey in this strange, almost plot-free collection of sequences, many of which seem calculated to make the audience challenge their conceptions of what can be considered acceptable viewing. The extraordinarily beautiful Carol Laure goes through a series of increasingly odd experiences until she ends up pleasuring herself while writhing around stark naked in liquid chocolate in a sequence which surprised me at how explicit it was, particularly for 1974, and especially given that it was intended for public exhibition. And this was one of the the "normal" bits. Murder, war crimes, borderline paedophilia, and bodily waste all feature as one continues trying to a) keep one's dinner down and b) figure out what it all means.

I'm no wiser, but I am sure that it's not entertainment.

Another reviewer here wrote that this film is like Pasolini's Salo as a comedy - that's best description of it I can think of.

Sweet Movie is definitely flawed (as is the brilliant Salo): some political/social messages are a bit heavy handed and it's not half as subtle, or subtly crafted, as Makavejev's earlier films. But maybe that's the point. You make a movie with Viennese Actionists, you're not going to get a very subtle film.

Makavejev is bizarrely forgotten or dismissed by critics and audiences alike these days (just look at the supercilious reviews for this film and WR in a certain London-based film guide!). Personally, I think he is as great a director as Bunuel or Godard. In fact, the Miss Canada storyline in Sweet Movie is very Bunuelian, reminiscent of Viridiana. Some of it is perhaps a bit too slapstick but it must be said her journey to Paris in a suitcase is a stunningly surreal image. Makavejev's depiction of her journey from socially-acceptable (intact) 'purity', innocently collaborative with the people who try to destroy her, to isolation and madness and finally to a model gyrating then (seemingly) drowning in chocolate is pretty shocking.

Makavejev seems to be interested in how people, and primarily their bodies (including corpses) and, er, their sexual being are used and abused by all of us, personally and within an institutional context. Often this stuff is sugar-coated for our 'protection'. The Actionists show this by breaking practically every taboo of polite society. But, like the portrayal of Reich in WR, Sweet Movie does not portray the Actionists' bodily 'freedom' un-ironically. Miss Canada's reaction to their ecstatic antics is finally one of disgust and alienation (which seems to be true of Carole Laure's own opinion of the film!).

The other storyline in this film, in which a revolutionary sea captain with sugar and other things in her hold falls in love with a Kronstadt sailor continues Makavejev's themes of what constitutes 'revolution' and 'freedom', what are its dangers, and what are the truths and lies present in that word. The scene in which the captain does a striptease is uncomfortable viewing to say the least. This seems to be another comment on what should or should not be taboo about the way we use our bodies and those of others. Hanzel and Gretel allusions about whom to trust are also pretty evident. The captain feels compelled to ensnare adults and children to preserve a vision of Soviet revolution in a weird Jeffrey Dahmer way. She is a vision of revolution: hopeful, free, angry loving ... and sometimes murderous.

Anyway, Sweet Movie is not Makavejev's best and seems to have blighted his career, but it's still one of the most challenging and provocative films you're likely to see. All I can say is: Long Live Makavejev. Any producers out there: give him some money to make another film!

Yeah, there is a lot of Reichian psychology and a political underpinning but the film is like a dream and has images that will stay with you for years. The film is obscene, it is meant to be, but in the manner of George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can't Say on Radio" or Lenny Bruce in his later, desperate performances. More about obscenity than obscene. It hits our buttons like a neurologist tapping a knee-cap. I never really thought of overdeveloped body-builders as obscene until I saw it in the context of this film.

When I lived in Houston in the 80s, the River Oaks Cinema, a fancy art-house was raided by the Houston vice squad. The double bill was Salo and Sweet Movie. I don't remember which was on the screen when the cops shut it down and sent everyone home. A few years later, Makavejev held a screening at Rice Univ. He said the parents of all the boys watching the striptease were in attendance and that unlike the legendary rumors about the eventual fates of the cast of "Lord of the Flies", all the boys turned out normal.

I noticed that Marpessa Dawn, the lovely Eurydice from "Black Orpheus", had a graphic love scene with the virgin, but at the end of the film, she was in the group at the scat commune and her head was shaved. Makavejev said, "How very perceptive!" She and her husband accompanied the crew to several locations, but at the Belgian scat cult, they had a blow-out. Marpessa sided with the coprophages and shaved her head in solidarity.

Just a note: the Rice Film series later featured Dennis Hopper, on the night he took the entire audience in a caravan to a drag-strip on the outskirts of town and tried to perform the "Exploding Chair" trick. See his biography for details.

First thing, this movie will certainly not be pleasant to most viewers. Even those who will like it (if they are any) or those who will find something interesting in it will still be left in a state of disorientation (and disgust). Contrary to many comments seen around, I really think one can make sense of this film. It helps to know that it was inspired, in part, buy W. Reich's psychology. This film aims at pushing to its limits the boundaries of the two world views (Weltanschauung) that dominated intellectual life in the 1970's western world: the bourgeois capitalist society and its anti-thesis named communism which is here presented bluntly in text and song or through the romantic experience of a commune (although the commune is everything but romantic!). The two women, who hold the narrative together, present each one of these world views. They reject both the conformism of bourgeois society (well, it is not totally conformist in this movie but I'll let you find out…) and the rigidity of communism. The bourgeois (the first woman's husband) is obsessed by cleanliness, has very bad knowledge of history (or reality?) and is incapable of sexually satisfying his wife (or rather his ways of satisfying them are not up to her standards – or any one else's by the way!). The commune members are obsessed with bodily fluids (all of them! which in a certain way, they share with the bourgeois), transgressing bourgeois values (showing that abundance often – if not always - makes you sick) and sexualizing every aspect of life. One of the key moments in the film is when the bourgeois woman leaves capitalism (exposed metaphorically through, for example, a game show and a helicopter ride over Niagara Falls). After a trip to Paris in a briefcase, she enters a commune in which she is incapable of feeling at ease as her new «friends» indulge in eccentricities for which she would not have imagined (or, analytically speaking, going back to them). The same thing happens albeit differently to the woman from a communist country. Travelling the world in a Marxist boat (that is a boat which has a huge head of Karl Marx on the front) she enters – almost dreamlike - a society of abundance metaphorically shown by the boat being full of sugar and candies. If the capitalist woman left her world for its antitheses – a commune - and stays incapable of satisfying her sexual desires (take note that she always seem to go back to were she came from although with different people and situations) – the communist one needs to seduce revolutionaries and pre-teens for that (she is sexually satisfied though – or so we are left to believe). But, in the end, she has to kill all who are seduced (does she have to destroy what gives her satisfaction?). The movie ends in a certain synthesis of those world views, as we see our capitalist woman sexually satisfying herself in a bath full of chocolate for television (again, she returns to were she started – on television). This movie, it seems to me at least, is much about creating discomfort in the viewer (maybe in a slightly Brechtian way, though without breaking the fourth wall, but certainly by creating discomfort). It also criticizes both capitalism and communism, nothing is left intact it seems. They are no clear winners. That is one of the reasons for which it is not for everybody. Yes, they are lots of graphic scenes which will, to say the least, shock most people, but those who limit their commentary to those scenes seem to miss the point completely. What will destabilize most viewers is that after all of this (and I haven't written about everything that we see), it does not try to answer any questions. What in the end is good or bad, Capitalism or Communism? I'm not saying this movie is great, but it got me thinking a lot. In such, this makes viewing it possibly rewarding (even if some of the scenes are really disgusting and others are plain silly). And depending on your sense of humour, you can get a good laugh at it - it got me laughing more than once.