Sweet Movie (1974)

Sweet Movie: Directed by Dusan Makavejev. With Carole Laure, Pierre Clémenti, Anna Prucnal, Sami Frey. After winning the “most virgin” contest, Miss Canada is married to a rich milk tycoon. But she quickly flees the marriage to experience the world around her, full of sweetness and anarchy.

“Dusan Makaveyev views–or viewed, back in the day–cinema as a form of Reichian orgone therapy. He sought to do to the spectator what a Reichian analyst does to a patient: take them out of their culturally accreted u0026quot;armoru0026quot; and return them to the Self Within. As the therapist tries to u0026quot;free upu0026quot; the encrusted body, so does Makaveyev try to free us up–in this picture, with a climax that violates so many taboos of civilization I dare anyone, even the most liberal-minded, not to be helplessly physically revulsed by it. This seems to be Makaveyevu0026#39;s aim: to push us through our ingrained disgusts to get us back in touch with the palpable physicality of being human. This means a long scene in which the eating of a meal gets mixed up with bulimic yakking, spitting, gargling, drooling, the smearing of food, and finally, ecstatically, a display of public execration.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eBack to anality, to fluids, to helpless babbling and expectorating–this is where Makaveyev wants us to go: pre-art, pre-politics, back to the anal-infantile wallow in the flesh. Makaveyev, even more than Cronenberg, is the most bodily of directors. You can almost reach out and feel everyone in this movie, from Mr. Muscles, a blankly grinning black bodybuilder, to the icky slobs spitting green beans on a huge, allegorical boat. Makaveyev is Mr. Anti-Transcendence. The tingling of nerves of our imperfect bodies is all we have. Makaveyev uses shock tactics to take us back there–like cutting from a gentle romantic scene to the ultimate anti-Reichian use of the body: Nazi doctors prodding at charred corpses.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eIn its wild and easy mingling of the pornographic, the horrific, and the gag-reflex-destructive, SWEET MOVIE feels like one of the (willfully) freest movies ever made. Makaveyev is a master filmmaker who was most recently found, via the Internet, as an instructor at Harvard, where one of his jobs was to u0026quot;moderateu0026quot; and politely sit by an undergraduate audience with Mel Gibson. Times ainu0026#39;t what they used to be for an anarchic, anti-ideological egghead/hedonist. Dig up SWEET MOVIE and mourn the world that couldu0026#39;ve been.”