Montenegro (1981)

Best movie of this year hands down!

An Exercise In Nonsense

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I guess with Sweet Movie Dusan Makavejev's bizarreness peaked and he decided to make something more straight forward. It is still by no means a regular movie, but there's weird and then there's "weirdest".This one is like a feminist tract about a bored, rich housewife who leaves her snobbish husband and perfect kids to stay with some bohemian Serbs who run a debauched night club.She has a fling with a young man, and yes, that does mean they have sex on a pile of food.I think with his less bizarre, assaultively creative movies, Makavejev also became less interesting. His next one, The Coca Cola Kid, was a new peak in that direction. This one had some of the outrageousness and some of the mundane. It was an intriguing concoction, but not as successful as WR:Mysteries of the Organism.

Mrs. Jordan is a rich house wife. She got all the things that maybe all of us need: a family, a couple of kids, a palatial house by the sea... But the movie shows the emptiness of her life: she is bored, she doesn't like her life. Her husband decides get some holidays on Brazil these Christmas... She decides to go with him but at the airport she falls in with some Yugoslavian immigrants that run a bar called Zanzibar. Attracted by their way of living she enters Zanzibar, she feels very well, she feels something different, she realizes that doesn't need all the things she had... When she phones her family, she finds out that her daughter (a nine years old girl) has taken her place at home: the girl cooks, cleans... Her husband says "it is so peaceful when your mother is not here"... He doesn't love her... And this is the problem: since Mrs. Jordan is unable to understand that, that her family doesn't need her, that all her life was wasted, and although she feels alive in Zanzibar, she forgets that she doesn't belong to the world of the Yugoslavian immigrants: she is out of place. So really she has no way to go. Very sad. Understanding that all your life was a nonsense, understanding that all your life has always been empty I suppose is not easy: so she kills the man who becomes her lover in Zanzibar and then kills all her family including the psychiatrist her husband hired !!!: the movie got some comic moments, but is not a joke in anyway. Makavejev scoffs at family, materialism, capitalism..., he is telling you "forget the money, forget the clothes, just feel the heat of life..." Think of it. Very good movie.

Susan Anspach is beautiful and delirious (must've been the acting lessons from Jack Nicholson), Marianne Faithfull singing "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" was a stroke of brilliance, and the scene of the husband prancing around the Danish moderne bedroom with his psychiatrist and his wife, wearing nothing but matching bathrobes juxtaposed to the gypsy basting the roast with the beer he's drinking is one of the most memorable scenes.I'd own this but there are children in the house. It is raunchy.

Montenegro is, without a doubt, one the freshest, most original and seldom seen gems on the planet. Anspach delivers a personal best as a housewife on the brink of insanity who befriends a band of eccentrics at the Zanzi Bar. What follows is a bizarre odyssey of sexual and emotional discovery. Robust characters, Pinter's beautiful cinematography, and tart humor make this a must. The stuff of life.