Story Movie
A multimillionaire’s mother selects the perfect virgin for her son on a TV talent show—a choice that, however, brings happiness neither to him nor to herself. Meanwhile, sailing through the waters of symbolism is a ragged tugboat with Marx’s head on its bow and a hippie girl on board, intoxicated by the revolutionary struggle, who is soon joined by a sexually obsessed sailor from *Potemkin*...
Review 4K Movie
Dusan Makaveev’s “Sweet Movie” is one of those cinematic statements of the 1970s that emerged, incidentally, at just the right time and place—a work that, in an instant, fires at all the intended and established targets from its own sharply satirical mortars, elevating the director’s utterly nihilistic worldview to the level of absolutism—a worldview in which there are no saints, no idols, no proletarians, no bourgeois, no capitalists, and no communists—all are equal in their blatantly vile essence, which the Yugoslav “enfant terrible” highlights all too sharply and graphically. In essence, there are no people as such in the film; humanism is dissolved in the sulfuric acid of total absurdity, and “Homo sapiens” is transformed by the director into something that defies clear classification according to Darwin, amounting to nothing more than a sort of homunculus with a whole complex of already incurable deviations à la Freud and Krafft-Ebing. Although there were certainly allusions to the logocentric aesthetics of de Sade, Réve, Jean Genet, and other champions of filth—both physical and spiritual. But is there even a spirit amid this oppressive, suffocating sweetness, this bitter-sour filth, which to some is akin to the most senseless joy—idiotic and syncretic?!
From scene to scene, increasingly suffering from an excess that levels what remains of reason—an excess marked by shameless aberration—and saturating the film’s initially sparse cinematic language with surrealistic, avant-garde, and nauseatingly naturalistic details, Dushan Makaveev boldly draws a thick line of a death sentence across all the major historical milestones of the 20th century—a century that brought plagues, wars, revolutions, collapses, and crises—everything that made the past century a century of storms and upheavals, in which Makaveev sees no good; his 20th century is an age of a nightmarish freak show, a sleepless dream of the mind, illogical angst, an age of unbelief and stillness, an age of mystery. The century is nothing. A great void and a deliberately overcomplicated simplicity, whose prostate is massaged by a heated virgin maiden, who will soon be sacrificed by both the predators of the Yellow Devil and the henchmen of a socialist utopia, closed in on itself, on wild atheism and the cult of Marxism-Leninism, inevitably drowning in chronotopic dreams of eternal world revolution, evolution, involution, but, according to Dusan Makaveev, also of banal pollutions in blood, shit, and sperm. Makaveev, however, unlike Pasolini, Fellini, or Cavallone—who are more inclined toward metaphorical reflection—or Khodorovsky, with his metaphysical wanderings and vacillations, operates in a far more straightforward, even overly blunt, manner. When it comes to the American value system embodied by the classic “American Dream,” neither the Dollar nor Capital are subtly veiled—they are even caricatured, as is the characteristic hyper-machismo; the entire Western world, as rendered in the style of Hieronymus Bosch by Makaveev’s brush, is depicted in Otto Mühl’s commune, where the director both perverts The Last Supper—replacing wine and holy water with shit and vomit—and subtly mocks the free-thinking and promiscuity of the “flower children.” The hippie world seems like an endless hell where everyone is punished with a life of torment. But the world on the other side of the Iron Curtain is no less hideous: Mother Revolution, also known as Anna Planeta, behaves like the filthiest of all filthy whores, ultimately dispassionately committing an act of pederasty and orgiastic fetishistic consumerism. Capitalism is nothing; socialism is nothing; beauty, love, even sex—reduced by the director to brutal anti-aestheticism, to animalistic instinct—is also nothing, just like the characters, reduced to a state of complete unreality; and thus everything inevitably leads to death. Or to wordless procrastination, but death is all the more evident: it awaits both Miss Canada, who has let herself be swept into the Dantesque circles of the underground, and Miss Revolution, who literally kills her children, only for them to be reborn as new dictators. One cannot deny Makaveev’s foresight: Milošević and Broz Tito were also such “children of the century,” as were all those on the many sides of that fratricidal war that erupted into a conflict between Western and Eastern societies—those who ruined and killed Yugoslavia, drowning it in blood. And later, this image of a country drifting from nowhere to nowhere found its way into Kusturica’s *Underground*—the circle was complete.
At the same time, it becomes abundantly clear that Makaveev, following in the still-fresh footsteps of the French New Wave filmmakers (objectively drawing inspiration from nearly all of them at once), does not shy away from deliberate postmodernist references, ranging from Sergei Eisenstein’s *Battleship Potemkin* by Sergei Eisenstein—while simultaneously reinterpreting Socialist Realism as neo-naturalism—to the exploitative femininity of Russ Meyer’s films. In addition to the dichotomy based on political secondary sexual characteristics that it adopts, the film is characterized by its patchwork narrative, which leaves one without a fully formed sense of the presence of any main characters as such. For all its mastery within the film’s chaotic structure, the heroes of our time—which has outgrown itself in the throes of total social nausea—turn out to be not two silly girls from different corners of life, but the entire world, mundane and shriveled to the wrinkles on the old body of what is already new propaganda, pornographic to the point of madness and perverted to unimaginable extremes. The sweet deception of a bitter star not named the Sun, but Wormwood, which blooms like a nuclear mushroom cloud of unatoned sins.
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