Sweet Movie

Very possibly the most visually and thematically subversive and politically iconoclastic and esoteric “avant-garde black comedy” ever made, Sweet Movie (1974) directed by Serbian auteur Dušan Makavejev (Montenegro, The Coca−Cola Kid) is undoubtedly one of those rare aberrant arthouse films that appeals to both patently pretentious cinephiles of the extreme left who regard Marixst auteur Jean-Luc Godard as their cinematic savior, as well as depraved and socio-politically unconscious exploitation film burnouts who regard Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1980) as their 'Citizen Kane' and Jap scat as their closest thing to spirituality, and are just looking to feel even the slightest bit of activity in their irrevocably intemperate and innately impure souls, thus making this self-described sugar-coated piece of sordid Serb-concocted cinema an ideally idiosyncratic celluloid feast, albeit one that might cause you to ‘do the technicolor yawn.’ The first film Makavejev directed after being exiled from his now-defunct multicultural nation of Yugoslavia for his similarly cinematically seditious work W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) – a film about the lurid and loony link between Marxism and subversive sexuality featuring pro-incest/anti-fascist Jewish Marxist/psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich as its central subject – Sweet Movie is a Canadian production that was partially funded by the National Film Board of Canada and is a part ‘anti-communist, communist’ cinematic manifesto and part rabid renegade attack against anti-revolutionary sexual repression of Western capitalism and its cuckold cousin, contemporary communism. Sweet Movie is indubitably a cinematic work with a metaphysical message most directly directed to the populous of Makavejev’s homeland and other Soviet satellite states, yet is so aesthetically audacious, sickly salacious, and cleverly crafted that one need not be a downtrodden Slav slave of the degenerate commie dystopia realm to enjoy it. A marvelously mad piece of classic yet morally corrupted celluloid montage centering on two stories about two different but inevitably equally warped women – a virginal model with a glowing golden pussy who is despoiled by a diverse collection of capitalist pigs around the materialistic globalized Occidental world and a female pedophile ship captain with a sick obsession with sex, candy, and communism – Sweet Movie is a delightful and deranged piece of dichotomous cinema that reminds the viewer how the two big business c’s (capitalism and communism) have literally and figuratively fucked the world to the point where the other two big biological c's (cocks and cunts) have been so perverted, misused, and abused that everyone seems to have forgotten to use them in the traditional way by uniting them. In short, Sweet Movie is probably the only film ever made that can be simultaneously appreciated by fetishistic scat fiends, fascist libertines, cosmopolitan commies into coprophilia and racial cuckoldry, and stoic fans of cinema and/or twentieth century world history.

Miss Monde 1984/Miss Canada (Carole Laure) seems like a lucky gal, at least upon her initial appearance in Sweet Movie as a 'sweet' lady who has a radiant rosebud and a holy hymen that is still intact, thus allowing her to beat a wild Negress, Miss Congo (a woman who wears bananas as a skirt) and a barbarous and butch Miss Yugoslavia in a super satirical "most virgin" contest – a patently perverse pageant of pussy parading that is symbolic of the sexually impotent and fiercely fetishistic capitalist West's absurd obsession with the preposterous 'virginal whore' archetype – where each contestant's cunt its meticulously examined in a sterile, sexless Annie Sprinkle-sideshow-style 'Public Cervix Announcement' by Dr. Mittlefinger; a, “brilliant master of deep insights and even deeper insights.” As a prize, Miss Monde, a virginal yet more than willing sacrifice to capitalism, is married to a mad megalomaniac and milk industry tycoon with a masochistic mommy complex named Mr. Kapital (John Vernon) – a man with a golden cock who does not know the difference between Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, but respects the man all the same for starting the Russian Revolution of 1917 – but on the night of the ritualistic deflowering, the undefiled beauty queen is repelled by her new husband’s nasty affinity for wacky ‘water sports,’ thus leading to the premature severing of the relationship between the two ill-fated lovebirds that almost gets the beauteous bride killed via drowning by her bastard ex-beau’s puritanical mother. Meanwhile, commie captain Anna Planeta (Anna Prucnal) sails her degenerate boat filled with candy and featuring a jigaboo-like Karl Marx figurehead around the dams of Amsterdam as she attempts to recruit young men and little boys for her sexually subversive sugarite/Trotskyite revolution. In a display of anachronistic absurdity, Planeta manages to attract a sugar-sex-obsessed sadomasochistic sailor (Pierre Clémenti) from the failed Battleship Potemkin of 1905 who proceeds to mount the captain into orgasmic oblivion, but Miss Monde is not as lucky. Taken away by her ex-husband’s monstrously muscular Mandingo bodyguard (played by real-life bodybuilder Roy Callender) and carried up a gigantic milk bottle advertisement by the bodacious black buck in a sardonic scene in anti-tribute to King Kong (1933) that will probably prove to be totally traumatizing for contemporary white liberals, Miss Monde verbally assaults her kindly kidnapper by spouting nonsensical/contradictory slurs like, “Hitler, Dirty Jew” and “fascist pig” (he prefers being called a “Neanderthal”), so he sexually degrades her and ships her in a red suitcase that eventually lands in the Eiffel Tower, where she is his masterfully manhandled by a flamboyant Mexican singer/actor named 'El Macho' (Sami Frey; a boy toy of Brigitte Bardot during the 1960s) who has no problem asserting his manhood despite his questionably queer Cockette-esque persona. Unfortunately, a couple of prudish Italian catholic nuns see Miss Monde mounted via her meat-curtain by the mighty Mexican with mascara, thus sparking a stake of sensual shock that eventually leads her to ending up at Viennese Aktionist Otto Muehl's hysterical sex commune where the accursed beauty witnesses infantile shit-eating and vile fetishistic projectile vomiting, but she manages to develop a particular fondness for one of the member's flaccid members. Planeta also falls in love; first with the hitchhiking sailor and then with a couple little boys, but ends up killing them all in the end, thus leading to another failed commie revolution, albeit this time of the pinko pussy sort, where mania for Marx merely leads to physical and intellectual masturbation and eventually mindless murder and mayhem. Like all idealistic political revolutions rooted in impossible dreams far away from real-life, Planeta lured them in with starry-eyed sweet talk (this time with literal candy and a cushy and charismatic comrade cunt), but as the great gay Sturmabteilung (SA) brownshirt leader Ernst Röhm – a wildly wanton man who literally wallowed in the scatological colors he once wore – once self-prophetically stated not long before he himself was sacrificed under the dubious pretense of being a treacherous sodomite during the 1934 Night of the Long Knives (Hitler's political purge), “All revolutions devour their own children.” Miss Monde on the other hand, eventually turns into literal salacious sweetness as a model whose bare-skinned body is covered in liquid chocolate for a smutty and sensual yet sweet and sugary advertisement, thereupon marking the triumph of capitalism over the individual via sexual subjugation, displacement, and abstraction; the wretched root of the phenomenon of aberrant fetishism that seems to have become the norm in the Western world.

If one learns anything of value from Sweet Movie, it is that postmodern utopian boat bolshevism, as well as its less avant-garde blends, turns women into fetishistic and fratricidal killers of men and boys and that the sort of sanitized ‘sexual freedom’ offered by capitalism results in foul fetishism, including (but surely not limited to) urolagnia (a perverse pleasure for piss), emetophilia (sexual arousal via vomiting), paraphilic infantilism (grown men who get off to retrogressing to a baby state), scatophilia (a sexual fondness for feces), aquaphilia (wanton for water), exhibitionism, vampirism, wet and messy fetish (WAM) aka sploshing, miscegenation, and pedophilia, which has only spread all the more in the increasingly globalized, technocratic world with the fall of the Soviet Union and the homogenizing of the third world via Americanization/Hollywoodization since the release of Makavejev’s film almost four decades ago. Convicted pedophile Otto Muehl – who oddly received the Iron Cross for bravery in fighting in the National Socialist army during the Second World War before his decided degeneration and dedication to Aktionism, and who disliked Sweet Movie, stating, “It was all prescribed” – and his primitive commune of shit-eating, infantile man-babies and fetishistic regurgitators symbolize the height of human devolution via a mostly materialistic weltanschauung comprised of communism, anti-nationalism and ethno-masochism, and the soulless and superficial capitalistic promise of 'sexual liberation.' Interestingly, close-ups of Judeo-Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s (real name Lev Davidovich Bronshtein) ugly rat-like mug is featured throughout Sweet Movie, especially during boat scenes of Planeta and her patriots of pomo pinko perversity.  On top of being a stern proponent of the worldwide ‘permanent revolution,’ Trotsky was also a Freudian who advocated the sexualization of children at a young age so as to make them early lifelong slaves of their own sensuality, hence why aristocratic English writer Aldous Huxley (who was certainly ‘in the know’ when it came to world affairs) included a sexually promiscuous girl named ‘Polly Trotsky’ in his popular dystopian sci-fi novel Brave New World (1931) as the novelist saw the future as a bleak one where humans had the sexual discipline of chimpanzees and could not think past their own impulsive needs for personal gratification at the cost of intelligence, knowledge, and kultur, among other things, thus making Anna Planeta the sugary Trotskyite of Makavejev's bodacious bent world of internationalized wantonness and askew erotic instincts propelled by innately anti-organic sociopolitical systems of cultural chaos.  Indeed, at best, the cinematic beauty of Sweet Movie is unwaveringly bittersweet, but I guess one cannot ask for better in a world where groups of grown men find sexual solace in swimming in their own shit and retrogressing into an infantile state, a subculture of severely sick sodomites known as 'Bugchasers' actively pursue being buggered ('bareback' style) by 'Giftgivers' (aka HIV-positive poofs) so as to oftentimes become, like far-left French philosopher Michel Foucault, sadomasochistic spreaders of the diseases themselves as a potential 'poz-cock' killer, and post-menopausal women known as 'cougars' devote their lives to sexually preying on young men that could be their grandsons.

-Ty E