Sweet Movie (1974)

Featured Audience Ratings

• AJ V

  
  Another very weird movie from the 70s, there are three different stories included and just when you think one story is strange, the next one is even more outrageous. I liked the one about the lady and her candy boat, that could have been it's own movie. Overall, it's okay.

• Cassandra M

  
  There are some films that are designed to shock, some designed to titillate, some that delight in disgusting the view. For Makavejev, shock, disgust and titillation are never the purpose, but a means to a form of psycho-liberation. Makavejev in Sweet Movie hurtles us head first into… More
  There are some films that are designed to shock, some designed to titillate, some that delight in disgusting the view. For Makavejev, shock, disgust and titillation are never the purpose, but a means to a form of psycho-liberation. Makavejev in Sweet Movie hurtles us head first into the confronting theses of Post-Freudian Wilhelm Reich. We are forced to confront our relationship to our primal beings. He literally smears our consciousness with faeces, vomit and carnality. We cannot watch orgiastic scenes of regressive acts, a sensual striptease played out inches from the faces of young boys, Carol Laure masturbating in a pool of molten chocolate without a visceral reaction. We are forced to confront our own repressed desires and shine a light in the dark recesses of our own psyche. Here is revolution at it's most personal, montaged together with lashings of wild humour. Allow your head to give up control and come along for the ride. Recommended to anyone who is willing to put their concept of themselves on the line a risk a flirtation with prurient madness.

• Stephen M

  
  A thoroughly pretentious, incoherent, arty piece of nonsense from start to finish. There are a couple of good scenes (and they're not necessarily the more startling ones) but they're not really worth waiting for. The film was rejected by the BBFC in 1975 and would almost… More
  A thoroughly pretentious, incoherent, arty piece of nonsense from start to finish. There are a couple of good scenes (and they're not necessarily the more startling ones) but they're not really worth waiting for. The film was rejected by the BBFC in 1975 and would almost certainly fall foul of the same censor today on child protection grounds. The one star I am awarding is for the excellent use of music throughout; as others have said, the soundtrack is amazing.

• Eric B

  
  "Sweet Movie" has been described as one of the most disgusting films ever made, and while it does have some repellent scenes, they don't seem so dire when compared with any number of gory slasher flicks. Perhaps the description should be softened to "most… More
  "Sweet Movie" has been described as one of the most disgusting films ever made, and while it does have some repellent scenes, they don't seem so dire when compared with any number of gory slasher flicks. Perhaps the description should be softened to "most disgusting, without using special effects"? Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavejev is said to be heavily influenced by psychologist Wilheim Reich, and I am not familiar enough with Reich's work to knowledgeably comment. The most relevant background which I gather from the Web is that Reich was an eccentric, semi-disgraced Freudian and Marxist with some extreme theories about the orgasm being key to releasing tension and regulating a healthy mind and body. So, I can see how "Sweet Movie" could serve to trigger primal urges as some sort of cathartic therapy, but I still don't know why Makavejev is so fixated on sexualizing food. Or if Reich shared this bent. This multi-language film opens like one of the era's druggy, subculture comedies such as "Kentucky Fried Movie" or "Tunnelvision." After a woman bellows a short, abrasive song which asks the timeless question "Is it cowshit or my beloved?", we see a bizarre TV game show which aims to crown "Miss World 1984." The winner must be a virgin, so the stage includes a rotating gynecological table where one "Dr. Littlefinger" can verify the contestants' purity. The prize is 50 billion dollars, plus a marriage to dairy magnate Mr. Dollars (John Vernon, three years before playing Dean Wormer in "Animal House"). Once the good doctor peers into Miss Canada's vagina (which literally glows with virtue), there can be no doubt about the winner. The extravagant Dollars flies his new bride to his compound near Niagara Falls, and they embark on a life together. But not so fast -- the marriage is over within a day. Dollars swabs down his naked wife with rubbing alcohol and prepares to mount her but, oops, she discovers that he has a solid gold penis! She screams, flees and and her odyssey of self-discovery begins. (Vernon fans should realize that he only appears during the film's first 20 minutes, and that a stand-in presumably supplied the closeup of his golden organ.) Meanwhile, a second story emerges. An attractive blond woman triumphantly stands atop a barge sailing the canal of an unnamed city. (Or maybe it's the Seine in Paris?) Her ship is called "Survival" (this name turns ironic), and it has a huge representation of Karl Marx's head on the stern. Meanwhile, a cheery young man, dressed like an old-time Potemkin sailor, is madly trying to catch her attention from various waterside points. His courtship efforts seem cute and charming, until the ship comes across him merrily urinating at shore's edge, waving his penis at her. Kids today, I tell ya. From these modest beginnings, the story turns a bit peculiar. The runaway bride meets a leering black bodybuilder, who lives in an empty milk tower. After ravishing her, he packs her in a suitcase and flies her to Paris. There, she meets a famous Spanish actor/singer shooting a movie. At one point, she shows her lust for him by cracking two eggs over her head and smearing the yolk into her hair. Later, they have sex and somehow get glued together during coupling. This is where her string of lurid encounters started to remind me of the 1968 comedy "Candy." "Sweet Movie" is stuffed with depraved sights and dialogue, and continuing to detail them would be exhausting and counterproductive. There's a catchy song on the soundtrack, featuring lines such as "It's fun to have nothing/Do things in the nude/Oh, it's sweet to be hungry/it's finger-licking good." The blonde from the ship does a taboo striptease for three boys around 10 years old, with the suggestion that she has sex with them afterwards. A woman tenderly breastfeeds the heroine. There's a urine-based sponge bath. There is gruesome footage of a real-life mass burial. The blonde and sailor have sex in a large bin of white sugar, leading to a particularly shocking outcome. But all this pales next to the climactic set piece of obscenity (we're talking the last half hour!), where our Miss World ends up in a commune of people who were apparently known as Viennese Actionists. The group seems devoted to orgiastic, chaotic feasts of food and sex, and their antics turn truly grotesque. There is plenty of onscreen urination, self-induced vomiting and defecation, plus various folks enjoying the byproducts of those games. Food and body excretions become virtually indistinguishable from each other -- a large banquet table becomes a sloppy dumping ground for countless products both digested and undigested. Nothing is simulated. The notorious final scene finds the lead writhing nude in a vat of dark, gloppy chocolate for a commercial. It is not sexy. Something about the film's title, cartoonish poster graphics and candy theme made me flash on "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" beforehand. I imagined a splashy, sensual ambience with bright energy and high production values. I thought wrong. The look is gritty, low-budget and poorly lit, with lots of homely people doing distasteful things. There are no laughs beyond the opening game show, and no titillation which isn't tainted by more negative feelings. "Sweet Movie" is unique and perhaps braggable to have seen, but it's just not very good.