An international co-production of companies from France, Canada, and West Germany, the film follows two women: a Canadian beauty queen, who represents a modern commodity culture, and a captain aboard a ship laden with candy and sugar, who is a failed communist revolutionary.
Plot
The first narrative follows Miss Monde 1984/Miss Canada, who wins a contest of the "most virgin"; her prize is the marriage to a milk industry tycoon. However, following his degrading puritanical introduction to intercourse,[clarification needed] she vents her intention to leave to her mother-in-law who, at that point, nearly has her killed. The family bodyguard takes her away, further humiliates her, and finally packs her in a trunk bound for Paris. She finds herself on the Eiffel Tower, where she absently meets and has intercourse with a Latin singer, El Macho. The sexual act is interrupted by touring nuns who frighten the lovers into penis captivus. In her post-coital shocked state, she is adopted into an artist community led by Otto Muehl, where she finds affectionate care. The commune practices some liberating sessions, where a member, with the assistance of the others, goes through a (re)birth experience, cries, urinates and defecates like a baby, while the others are cleaning and pampering him. Later she is seen acting for a television advertisement, in which she is naked, covered in liquid chocolate, striking seductive poses and finally drowned in the chocolate.
The second narrative involves a woman, Anna Planeta, piloting a candy-filled boat in the canals of Amsterdam with a large papier-mâché head of Karl Marx on the prow. She picks up the hitchhiking sailor Potemkin (a reference to the 1925 Soviet film Battleship Potemkin), though she warns him that if he falls in love, she will kill him. He ignores her warnings for him to leave and their relationship evolves. In the state of love making, she stabs him to death in their nidus made of sugar. She then seduces children into her world of sweets and revolution, eventually getting arrested by the Dutch police who lay down plastic sacks containing the children's bodies on the side of the canal—implying they too have been murdered by Planeta. The film ends with the children, unseen by the others, being reborn from their plastic cocoons.
The film was originally intended to focus solely on the experiences of Miss Canada. However, the actress portraying the character, Carole Laure, left the production after becoming increasingly disgusted over the actions required for her performance; she decided to quit after shooting a scene in which she fondled a man's penis on-screen. After Laure's departure, Makavejev rewrote the script to include the second narrative, starring Anna Prucnal.
Reception
The film created a storm of controversy upon its release, with scenes of coprophilia, emetophilia, implied child molestation, and footage of real-life remains of the Polish Katyn Massacre victims. The 5 April 1976 issue of Time mentioned Sweet Movie as an example of the "porno plague" allegedly spreading in the United States.[5] The film was banned in many countries, including the United Kingdom,[6] or severely cut. Polish authorities banned Prucnal, a Polish citizen, from using her passport over the involvement in the film, which prevented the actress from entering her native country for a number of years.
Makavejev said: "After Sweet Movie it was as if I had burned all my bridges. I just lost the chance to talk to producers."[7]
Critical response
Sweet Movie received mixed reviews from critics. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 50% approval rating based on 22 reviews, with an average rating of 5.4/10.[8]
American philosopher Steven Shaviro commented that, in Sweet Movie, Makavejev went where no filmmaker had gone[9] but the film is "too intellectual to be ecstatic [and] too visceral to be theorizable", and that "certain questions [Sweet Movie] asks simply can't be answered", such as whether the practices seen in Otto Muehl's commune were genuinely liberating or forced by the commune's groupthink.[10]
Sweet Movie: Poems, a winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series by poet Alisha Dietzman, is an ekphrasis of the film. The book mirrors "the uncertain, unstable tenor of Dušan Makavejev’s controversial avant-garde film Sweet Movie."[11][12]
Home media
The film was nearly impossible to find since its initial release in 1974, until The Criterion Collection released the film on DVD in a region 1 DVD on June 19, 2007.
^Shaviro, Steven (2018). "WR: Mysteries of the Organism & Sweet Movie". In Erent, Vadim; Rhoads, Bonita (eds.). Dušan Makavejev: Eros, Ideology, Montage. Litteraria Pragensia. Prague: Univerzita Karlova. p. 31. ISBN978-80-7308-564-3.
^Shaviro, Steven (2018). "WR: Mysteries of the Organism & Sweet Movie". In Erent, Vadim; Rhoads, Bonita (eds.). Dušan Makavejev: Eros, Ideology, Montage. Litteraria Pragensia. Prague: Univerzita Karlova. p. 32. ISBN978-80-7308-564-3.
^Foundation, Poetry (29 December 2023). "Review: Sweet Movie". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 30 December 2023.
