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SWEET MOVIE
1974
DUSAN MAKAVEJEV
Think you've seen everything, my fellow jaded new-millenniumites?
Rating Sweet Movie is like trying to rate a headache,
a bout of nausea, an orgasm, or a nightmare, all experienced
simultaneously. Makavejev's 25-year old orgiastic and vomitous
anarchist manifesto spurts out enough disturbing images to make
Todd Haynes or Jan Svankmajer seem like Charles Schulz. Excess
of sweets doth sicken, or like that.
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| The movie has two loosely intertwining
stories, one focusing on a Miss World Virgin winner (Carole Laure)
whose sexual initiation and adventuring in the capitalist West
leads to a descent into truly sickening material precincts. The
second storyline counterpoints this gross Western indulgence
with the more communitarian but equally doomed trajectory of
an Eastern European couple sailing a Marx-mastheaded barge with
a hold full of sugar up the river of history. Political allegory,
you know. Recalling the fuss a few years back when an Oklahoman
discovered an old videotape of The Tin Drum, with its
relatively wholesome scene of a barely pubescent Oskar frolicking
with an older girl, one might infer that the recent bombing of
Makavejev's native Yugoslavia might be traced to the appearance
of a copy of Sweet Movie inside the Washington beltway.
Anyway, Filmlit is not liable for any gastrointestinal
distress or psychosexual meltdown that ensues from your decision
to rent Sweet Movie. |