Sweet Movie (1974)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

It is a performances centric movie

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

It should surprise no one who has seen Sweet Movie that the film divides opinion. Precisely when the viewer's delight at the film's irreverent humour and carnivalesque whimsy threatens to overcome his sense of revulsion he is besieged with scenes of disgusting debauchery or stock footage of mass graves. The entire film is a deliberate affront to or subversion of cinematic conventions and societal norms. Familiar images, symbols, and scenes are smeared with excrement or defiled with incongruous sexual and violent overtones. An advertisement for chocolate becomes pornography, lovemaking an opportunity for murder, and the sacred blasphemous.The brilliance of Sweet Movie lies in its unrestrained creativity and its ability to induce paroxysms of laughter. It is the perfect antidote to the solemnity, melodrama, and mawkishness of popular cinema. Few directors possess the genius to conjure up a sugar boat or chocolate bath and even fewer the effrontery to incorporate these images into a film, particularly in the peculiar and outrageous manner that Makavajev does. Sweet Movie was destined to be censored or banned from the moment its conceit gave birth to a film. Indeed, Polish authorities found Anna Prucnal's (Anna Planeta) participation in the film so objectionable that they prohibited her from entering her country of birth for several years! The film centers around a few set pieces whose utter originality and depravity make them unforgettable. To avoid revealing too much about the film, I shall discuss one. The scene of the feasting orgy, at which the actress Carole Laure was so appalled she quit the production, is one of the most disgusting in the history of cinema. I consider this an achievement. The food and drink consumed at a feast is summarily expelled, vomited, or excreted at, on, or nearby the feasting table. A second childishness inexplicably possesses the revelers leading to incontinence, babbling, and egregious misbehaviour. Each excess is mimicked or met with an even greater one. The scene culminates in a few miscreants depositing their own faeces on platters and parading them around the warehouse to the merriment of all present. Sweet Movie is thus a film one can taste, smell, and feel. The film is besides so well-seen that the viewer, for better or for worse, cannot un-see it.Sweet Movie is not merely the expression of a chaotic explosion of creativity devoid of any meaning. Makavajev has messages for the viewer notwithstanding his extremely oblique way of communicating them. Capitalism, supposedly a superior economic system to communism, is represented as equally decadent and depraved, no less violent or deadly. The film is also an ironic indictment of the excesses of the free love movement, the feasting orgy a manifestation of the most hyperbolic and grotesque caricatures of its members. Our visceral shock at their licentious and intemperate behaviour exposes our moral hypocrisy for our shock is scarcely greater when presented with evidence of mass murder. Deplorable conduct and outright criminality, moreover, when presented in a pleasant manner, by way of a beauty pageant, for instance, or perpetrated by a person whom society has arbitrarily judged as reputable, such as an extremely wealthy man, is met with disbelief or entirely excused.Sweet Movie dredges up parts of our psyche that we wish we didn't have or pretend we don't and unflinchingly, even joyously, captures them on film. If the resulting concoction is sweet, it is cloying and disgusting. I consider it a masterpiece, a must-see for fans of art cinema and the bizarre.

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

This is one of those great, "cinematic endurance test" films. It's really an amazing piece of cinema, maybe like Godard meets Jodorowsky. It is reminiscent of Pasolini's Salo, except it has more humour, and is nowhere nearly as bleak as that film. It has a well deserved reputation of being a shocking, polarizing film, but I think it's amazingly good.Dusan Makavejev is a great director, and there are other things going on here aside from a boring, staid debate over Communism vs. Capitalism. The "commune" scene is what really pushes people over the edge here. The participants were an actual real commune run by artist/filmmaker/painter Otto Meuhl, and everything you see is pretty much real. Even though Dusan explains who they are and what they were about in the interview on the disc, it doesn't detract from the strangeness or the mystery of why they are there, and why Little Miss Virginity ends up partying with them. The scene is so wild that you can't believe it actually happened. Here we see people urinate on each other here, indulge in emetophilia and coprophilia. And later a couple makes love in sugar and chocolate. Does this sound interesting to you? It should, because the film makes other points as well. It's not just shock value here.And despite the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR, the film hasn't really dated. An absolutely fascinating aspect of this film is that it starts out as a 70's time capsule, at least that's what I thought when I started watching it. The Little Miss Virginity contest would have shocked audiences in 1974, but not today. But as the film progresses, it gets stranger, more surreal, many things are left unexplained, and the ending is very haunting. It is not a time capsule, but a continuously challenging bit of cinema. It has retained its power over the years (quite like its stoic, humourless cousin, Salo). The movie burns into your retina, and you can't shake it, no matter how "jaded and hip" you think you are. It's really quite outstanding, and I'm very thankful that Criterion released this film on DVD. It has been notoriously hard to find, especially in its uncut, uncensored version. Many films use the word "uncensored" as a marketing gimmick, but this film was really censored in many countries (and is still banned in many of them today). I won't go into any more details about it, other than you will never forget this film.

Almost every review I see is just the person describing the bizarre scenes that you witness. And, I don't blame them. Sweet Movie is almost beyond words. It has weird scene after weird scene followed by a weird song. The Planet Earth and Birth song was especially likable, it had me humming and singing almost immediately. In Sweet Movie you basically follow these two women, one who appears to be a virgin to almost all things in life, and then you have another woman who is completely just taking advantage of all that life has to offer. And by the end, each lady seems to reach a pretty realistic conclusion. Like many others, probably 80% of most people who watch this, I was confused more than anything else. I did enjoy the bizarreness of it all, but at the same time I really didn't find myself enjoying the movie a whole lot. Sweet Movie is definitely not for everyone. It's without a doubt way too hard for the average person to appreciate. But if you're a movie buff, open-minded to outrageous ideas and can stand a little bit of the perverse, Sweet Movie could be a nice treat for you. The only way I see myself seeing this movie again is if I can watch it with commentary.