This was the movie Makavejev made after his previous, WR:Mysteries of the Organism, got him exiled from his home country.I'm surprised this one didn't get him exiled to the moon.It is truly one of the most bizarre movies you will ever see, an orgiastic feast of sugar, blood, urine, faeces, vomit.It's a creative explosion, and ranks up there with Salo in terms of revolting content - in actual fact, it tops Salo. At least they didn't really drink urine.The story has two narratives: a beauty queen voted "best hymen" is urinated upon by a billionaire with a golden penis. A humungous black man takes her to his house inside a giant milk bottle and packs her up in a suitcase and sends her to Paris. There she has sex with a Latin singer and their genitals lock together. Somehow she ends up at a commune where men and women eat and spit food into each other's mouths, drink each other's urine and defecate onto silver dishes. The beauty queen is breast fed; indeed it seems that the purpose of the commune is to help people revert to childhood; one man is naked and has food rubbed all over his body while he urinates to the applause of his audience.The beauty queen ends up acting in an ad for chocolate sauce where she is covered, completely naked, in the stuff, writhing around as though masturbating.And I haven't even gotten to the other part of the story yet: a woman piloting a boat with Karl Marx's image on the front filled with sugary treats, luring men and boys to their death inside. At one point, in what may be the movie's most controversial scene, boys no older than twelve sit stationary while she dances almost naked, grinding her genitals on one boy's forehead.I may have little idea what all this means, but I've certainly never forgotten it, or failed to be enraptured by it.

I'm not the ideal audience for this, and you are likely not as well. It is a collage of images where each image in the small has universal connection, but the two great narrative strokes are situated in the time and place. You'll have to not only be aware of the great European repressive disasters of the 20th century, but be personally damaged by them as well.Those two threads are entertaining to report at least. A Russian woman — with an invisible crew — moves a large boat down the Danube, she aloft at the bow as conquering Viking, a huge face of Lenin on the front. It is filled with candy and as she floats downriver Huck Finn- wise, she seduces and kills men and boys, adding the bodies to the cargo. This includes two indelible scenes. One is her seducing the candy-hypnotized boys. A second is wonderfully cinematic. She picks up a revolutionary deserter. In the boat is a deep hold of granular sugar, in which she likely buries her victims. She and the man make love in that sugar, sometimes completely burying them. She controls him completely, then he gets stabbed laughing, sated.The other story has Canada's entry winning the contest for most beautifully formed hymen, winning marriage to the demented son of the world's richest woman. Her adventures are a sort of sexual perils of Pauline, with completely unusual situations. This includes getting publicly stuck in coitus with a movie star and being placed on a table in an active restaurant kitchen a la "Cook Thief, Lover."At the end our virgin has a scene much like the sugar orgasm, but in her case she is nude, drenched in chocolate and drowns in orgasm.Both of these women, communism and capitalism encapsulated in sexual bodies, end up in the same surreal asylum where we are exposed to one of the most negative surveys of societal bonding I have seen. This is the disgusting section you likely have heard about with the group celebrating rituals that seem depraved but that fit well within the political threads we have previously seen. These include historical footage about Nazis that are similar in tone.Its close to the ideal that Greenaway espouses: pure image with no "story;" narrative made in the mind, the way vision is made in radio plays. And there is real effectiveness and some beauty in these lives, sugar in their deaths.And at the very, very end, the children are reborn.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

SWEET MOVIE is not a movie for everyone. This is a film that displays some of the cruelest and most bizarre human behavior ever captured on film. It is a film that doesn't follow rules in any narrative sense nor in normal human decency. The film is indecent. It is a film that will make anybody that watches it feel unclean. It is not just a dirty movie, it is THE dirty movie. It could be considered pornographic by the point of view of some people, and it could be described as thought-provoking cinema by others. I personally think it is both. This is a film that should be taken seriously, but at the same time the subject matter should be taken with a grain of salt. It is a very funny film, but it is also a very terrifying film. It is a film that I don't regret watching and that I don't intend to ever watch again. There is a scene in this film in which a group of people eat at a banquet and have a joyous time before slapping food on each other and then proceeding to make themselves vomit. Soon, every bodily fluid is on display in this ghastly scene. All the urinating, vomiting, defecation, it is all real. There is a gory scene in which a woman disembowels a man in a vat of sugar and his blood mixes with the sugar and becomes a sticky concoction. There is archive footage of partly decomposed corpses and dead bodies thrown into the mix to add shock value. One of the characters is a woman who lures little boys onto a boat with candy and then abuses, rapes, and murders them. This is not a pleasant film. What I've described are only a few of the many horrific acts in this film. This is a difficult film to digest. However, it is effective and it technically has all the surroundings and characteristics of a film. This does make the film very relevant in what it sets out to do. Is it dishonest to make a film like this? I'm not sure. I don't know whether to consider it a good movie or a bad movie. Technically it is a good movie, but the sheer despicable factor of it all and the lack of an intentional point makes it far more difficult to recommend for even the more tolerant film buffs. I certainly didn't enjoy watching it but I did admire it. However, when I see a scene like the one in this film in which a woman stripteases four little boys who look rather noticeably uncomfortable and clearly grossed out, I begin to think of it as a film that just wants to offend as many people as possible. I don't know whether to like it because it succeeds in what it sets out to do or to hate it for basically the same reason. I guess in the end I have to say that it's up to the viewer to decide whether they can handle such an extreme film. I certainly don't want to scare people away from such an ambitious film, but I definitely don't want to say it's good to watch! This is not a film that one can take lightly. This is not a film anybody can truly forget. If you thought PINK FLAMINGOS and VISITOR Q were bad, this is the next level in extremities.

When I saw "Montenegro" all those years ago, it never really occurred to me that such a fantastic, idiosyncratic, and mysterious movie would actually come from a director that made other movies, too. It's just one of those things where each movie seems so ultimately different that it isn't feasible that there could be more of the same."Sweet Movie", to put it quite simply, is about excess. It's the story of two women, one a psychotic roaming candy-making pedophile boat woman, the other a delicate model/constant victim of sexual faux pas and impotency. The movie is filled with food, sex, and the gore that comes from food and sex. As the victimized woman finds herself in increasingly ridiculous situations and the psychotic woman puts people in others, many forms of abject art (revulsion/attraction, spewing and eating, killing and fornicating) keep a loaded bullet to the face of the viewer, mixed of course with a fair share of political asides and cultural themes (such as this: the fact that religious people appear scattered throughout the movie and are no more surprised by the activities of the characters than anyone else).This movie falls squarely between something you'd expect from Alejandro Jodorowsky and Juzo Atami. Unlike Jodorowsky's work, however, the symbolism has a lot of weight, and unlike Atami, there's a lot more ambiguity. Dusan Makavejev is one of the most post-modern filmmakers out there, constantly asking questions that previously didn't exist, and then proving that there's no answer to them. This movie comes closer to a strong theme than "Montenegro", but it's full of a lot of self-awareness that purposefully deconstructs the very notion of "theme". (A Mariachi singer in Paris is filmed, and through distraction is shown to be lip-syncing. Later in the film he's actually supposed to be singing--and again is shown to be lip-syncing.) In the end, it's hard to know what exactly to feel about this movie, minus revulsion for those of weak stomachs. It's both beautiful and intensely repulsive, which is a feat in either direction.--PolarisDiB