Sweet Movie

If Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was “a gob of spit in the face of Art,” Yugoslavian filmmaker Dusan Makavejev's originally X-rated 1974 Sweet Movie (which is anything but) is an anarchic and amoral scatological vaudeville show, featuring almost every other conceivable bodily excretion. Political, provocative, and profane, Sweet Movie defies synopsis. It begins with a beauty contest to find the most eligible virgin for the world's wealthiest man, Mr. Dollars (John Vernon), who has a gold-plated penis (subtlety is not one of Makavejev's strong suits). We also meet Captain Anna Planeta (Anna Prucnal), who pilots a cargo ship with an enormous Karl Marx figurehead on its bow (she will make love to, and then fatally stab, an ill-fated sailor in a vat of sugar). The final third of Sweet Movie is comprised of one excruciatingly long sequence in which members of a commune perform any number of vile acts, including defecating on plates, concluding with Mr. Dollars' put-upon bride writhing naked in a vat of chocolate. Interspersed throughout is disturbing black-and-white archival footage of the Katyn Forest massacre documenting Soviet atrocities against Polish prisoners of war. In the immortal words of Bertie Wooster, the “mentally negligible” employer of valet Jeeves in P.G. Wodehouse's stories: “Well, I mean to say, what?” While bracingly no-holds-barred, Sweet Movie is also dated, confounding, and unpleasant to watch. DVD extras include new interviews with Makavejev and Balkan film scholar Dina Iordanova, a brief clip of Prucnal singing a song from the film, and a booklet with two essays by film scholar David Sterritt and Harvard professor Stanley Cavell. Serious film studies collections may want to consider, but this is otherwise not recommended. (D. Liebenson)