This is one part of Dusan Makaveyv's agent provacteur of a film, Sweet Movie. The scenes of Anna Planeta are laced through another, unrelated plot, much as Terry Gilliam's animations punctuate the freeform semi-narrative of a Monty Python movie, or as Russ Meyer interrupts his stories periodically for shots of Uschi Digart bouncing her mammary glands. Indeed, Sweet Movie is a lot like a Monty Python satire mated with Russ Meyer-style sexual preoccupations and the randy humor of Playboy or Penthouse all pitched as a Cold War-era treatise aimed at an arthouse audience unaccustomed to such stuff.
That spectators at the 1974 Cannes film festival were shocked and upset by all this was really no surprise. As Makaveyev's spiritual heir Scott King would discover when he took his Treasure Island to the 1997 Sundance Festival, when you mix highbrow seriousness with graphic pornography and arch satire, you do so at your own peril.
You can't say Makaveyev wasn't warned. He'd been exiled from his own homeland for his cinematic excesses. Trained as a psychologist, the Yugoslav filmmaker launched his movie career with politically charged romantic dramas that wryly undercut the official Yugoslav Communist Party line-this was back when there was a Yugoslavia, and a Communist Party. After a few years of films such as Man Is Not a Bird, Makaveyev started to clue into the increasingly daring world of absurdist theater and experimental filmmaking. With 1968's Innocence Unprotected, Makaveyev abandoned traditional narrative structure altogether and never looked back. From then on, his films would be delirious collages of documentary realism and wildly abstracted fantasy. He was by that point on the Yugoslav blacklist for his political heterodoxy, and with the audaciously pornographic W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism he got himself banned outright.
Porn was still pretty new as a movie genre in the early 1970s, but even at that early stage some things were obvious: porn audiences were only interested in the sex scenes, while conventional audiences weren't too keen on having such prurient stuff intrude into their movies. The MPAA set up the X rating as a cinematic Berlin Wall to keep porn safely on its side of the divide. Every once in a while a maverick has come along to challenge the system, to shove erect penises and graphic sex acts into movies not intended for the raincoat crowd, but their fates have been largely unhappy-see Scott King's aforementioned Treasure Island, or the 1980s Roman Porno of Japan's Kiyoshi Kurosawa. W.R. flew famously into that breach, and energized with Makaveyev with a new sense of purpose.
Dusan, you see, was sincere in his Marxism. The giant head of Karl Marx that festoons the bow of Anna Planeta's Survival is depicted as crying because, as Makaveyv sees it, the Socialist states that took up in his name betrayed the real Marx. Stalinism was a false Revolution, and he railed angrily against it. But where many anti-Stalinists threw out the Communist baby with the Soviet bathwater, Makaveyev had no patience for American capitalism either. But what's an anti-idelogue to do when all the -isms are gone?
Dusan started to focus on those instances in modern history where the Soviets, the Fascists, and the Capitalists acted the same way, to draw attention to their similarities. One such instance concerned controversial psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Reich, the W.R. of W.R. - Mysteries of the Organism. He was a proto-feminist liberal thinker who believed free love and sexual promiscuity were key to human health. When the Nazis decided he should be carted off to the concentration camps, he fled to the US, where he was imprisoned and his writings were burned by the American government. Anyone whom both the Nazis and the Americans could consider a threat was a hero to Makaveyev. He made W.R. as a celebration of the man's ideas.
W.R.'s advocacy of a literally revolutionary sexual revolution got Makaveyev kicked out of Yugoslavia but won him fans in Western Europe. Some European financiers backed his next project, eager to see what he'd come up with next. He took their money and spent it on something that made W.R. look tame by comparison, and guaranteed no one would ever give him money to make a movie again.
Sweet Movie opens with a gaudy contest show not far from the kind of stuff Fox has actually broadcast in recent years. The televised Miss World competition is sponsored by the Chastity Belt Foundation in hopes of finding the most desirable virgin (whose qualifications are eagerly checked on air by the leering Dr. Middle Finger). The lucky winner (played by French singer Carole Laure) gets to marry the multi-billionaire milk baron Mr. Dollars (played by venerable character actor John Vernon).
Mr. Dollars' attitude towards matrimony is one of simple efficiency. A virgin wife offers safe sex without VD fears-or, as he so romantically puts it, "a purified sanitation system for unchecked waste." Trouble is, he means "waste" literally, and his idea of sex is to scrub his bride with rubbing alcohol and then urinate on her. When she objects, and starts to reconsider the marriage altogether, the family staves off alimony threats by having the poor girl kidnapped by a self-confessed philosophical psychopathic neanderthal and hauled off to-well, we'll return to her misadventures in a moment.
Periodically throughout the film, the journey of Anna Planeta (Polish actress Anna Prucnal) intrudes onto the screen as a countertheme. Where Miss World is a passive victim in her own life, dragged through events by outside forces, Anna is captain of her own destiny. Her own, and others too. Once she's had her way with the Potemkinite, she kills him. She later invites a gaggle of 10-year old boys aboard, offering them their choice of sex or candy-and these lads too are destined for body bags (though why she kills her bedmates is never clear). Say what you will about the Puritanism of Americans, but we don't cotton much to kiddie porn. The sight of Dennis the Menace with his head nestled in the private parts of a writhing Commie really ought to have been Sweet Movie's claim to notoriety, its most transgressive moment. But, a few minutes later, Makaveyev ups the ante with something even more shocking.
Miss World winds up at a commune modeled on the real-life Friedrichshof commune founded by Otto Muehl. I say "modeled on," but this is actually Muehl and his fellow cultists in the flesh. Something of a Wilhelm Reichist himself, Muehl argued that all contemporary social mores were unhealthy: real living came from uninhibited reveling in all bodily functions. His followers indulged in a form of therapy wherein they regressed to infanthood. What do babies do? They scream, they breastfeed, they spit up, they excrete their wastes with abandon. Seeing adults do these things, ritualistically, is rather extreme. Witness a gluttonous orgy of constant vomit, whose participants proudly defecate and smear their feces on their naked bodies.
For those hearty souls who haven't yet stormed out of the theater in disgust, Makaveyev has one last outrage to share. He splices in actual documentary footage of the discovery of the mass grave in the Katya Forest. Back during WWII, while battling the Nazis, Stalin rounded up prisoners of war in Poland and had them executed and dumped in a ravine like so much trash. For those who needed it, the revelation proved that Stalinism was indistinguishable from fascist tyrants. So much for the moral superiority of socialism.
On the face of it, the Katya Forest footage seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with the proceedings at hand. Where's the sex? Where's the candy? But, Makaveyev cannily juxtaposes scenes of adults behaving physically like infants with shots of nations behaving figuratively like babies. Which is the worse outrage? Sexually flirting with 10 year olds or genocide? Which is more off-putting? Seeing grown men peeing on themselves or watching powerful leaders eviscerate human rights?
The film ends in a slurry of blood and sugar, with the police rushing in to arrest the surviving characters (prefiguring the finale of Monty Python and the Holy Grail by several years). Makaveyev's critique is unforgiving, but even in the bleakest moments are found nuggets of hope-for those intrepid viewers still watching.
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by David Kalat
