Sweet Movie (1974)

In the contest of the "most virgin" Miss Monde 1984, Miss Canada wins, and prize is the marriage with the milk industry tycoon with his fifty billion dollars fortune. In their honeymoon, ... See full summary »

Director:

Dusan Makavejev

Writers:

France Gallagher (collaboration), Dusan Makavejev

Stars:

Carole Laure, Pierre Clémenti, Anna Prucnal

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Carole Laure	...	Miss Monde 1984 / Miss Canada
Pierre Clémenti	...	Potemkin Sailor
Anna Prucnal	...	Capitaine Anna Planeta
Sami Frey	...	El Macho
Jane Mallett	...	Mrs. Alplanalpe
Roy Callender	...	Jeremiah Muscle
John Vernon	...	Aristote Alplanalpe, AKA M. Kapital
Hansi Roll
Therese Schulmeister
Renate Steiger	...	(as Renata Steiger)
Berndt Stein
Herbert Stumpfl
Otto Muehl	...	Member of Therapie-Komune
Catherine Sola
Louis Bessières

Storyline

In the contest of the "most virgin" Miss Monde 1984, Miss Canada wins, and prize is the marriage with the milk industry tycoon with his fifty billion dollars fortune. In their honeymoon, Miss Canada "does not accept" the golden prostate of her husband, and with the support of the family bodyguard Jeremiah Muscle, she gets boarded to Paris. There she meets a Latin lip-sync singer, El Macho, they have an intercourse in Eiffel Tour and they get stuck together. She moves to an anarchic community of sodomy and later she becomes an actress working in a erotic chocolate advertisement. Meanwhile, the revolutionary, pedophile, and mad killer Anna Planeta makes candy in her boat while sailing through the canals of a city that seems to be Amsterdam. She meets the sailor Potemkin and they have a torrid affair. Meanwhile she uses her candies to seduce young boys and kill her lovers. In the middle of the story, it is presented what seem to be footages of a Nazi doctor and a slaughter in a war with ...

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Plot Keywords:

sex | pouring chocolate over naked body | fetish sex | sexual politics | orgy | 

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Genres:

Comedy | Drama | Mystery

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Certificate:

Not Rated

Details

Country:

France West Germany Canada

Language:

English French Polish Spanish Italian

Release Date:

12 June 1974 (France)

Also Known As:

Sweet Movie

Filming Locations:

Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands

Box Office

Budget:

CAD700,000 (estimated)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Maran Film, Mojack Film Ltée, V.M. Productions

Technical Specs

Runtime:

98 min 95 min (cut)

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Color (Eastmancolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.66 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

This film is part of the Criterion Collection, spine #390.

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Quotes

Mr. Kapital: [Mr. Kapital and Miss Canada in a helicopter flying above the Niagara Falls] You see that little fountain down there?
[points down to Niagara Falls]
Miss Monde 1984: Yes.
Mr. Kapital: It's gonna be my biggest undertaking in landscape architecture. I'm gonna buy it from the Canadian Government. I'm gonna renovate it, redecorate it. Get rid of the water, turn off the falls.
[Laughs]
Mr. Kapital: I'm gonna install an electronic, synthetic, laser moving image in livin' color. In livin' color, honey! Yeah. And we're gonna have a huge ...
[...]

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Connections

Referenced in Brows Held High: Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (2011)

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Soundtracks

Macho
Music by Pierre Dutour
Lyrics by Santiago El Ghi

User Reviews

Kind of like SALO, as a romantic comedy

Dusan Makaveyev views--or viewed, back in the day--cinema as a form of Reichian orgone therapy. He sought to do to the spectator what a Reichian analyst does to a patient: take them out of their culturally accreted "armor" and return them to the Self Within. As the therapist tries to "free up" the encrusted body, so does Makaveyev try to free us up--in this picture, with a climax that violates so many taboos of civilization I dare anyone, even the most liberal-minded, not to be helplessly physically revulsed by it. This seems to be Makaveyev's aim: to push us through our ingrained disgusts to get us back in touch with the palpable physicality of being human. This means a long scene in which the eating of a meal gets mixed up with bulimic yakking, spitting, gargling, drooling, the smearing of food, and finally, ecstatically, a display of public execration.

Back to anality, to fluids, to helpless babbling and expectorating--this is where Makaveyev wants us to go: pre-art, pre-politics, back to the anal-infantile wallow in the flesh. Makaveyev, even more than Cronenberg, is the most bodily of directors. You can almost reach out and feel everyone in this movie, from Mr. Muscles, a blankly grinning black bodybuilder, to the icky slobs spitting green beans on a huge, allegorical boat. Makaveyev is Mr. Anti-Transcendence. The tingling of nerves of our imperfect bodies is all we have. Makaveyev uses shock tactics to take us back there--like cutting from a gentle romantic scene to the ultimate anti-Reichian use of the body: Nazi doctors prodding at charred corpses.

In its wild and easy mingling of the pornographic, the horrific, and the gag-reflex-destructive, SWEET MOVIE feels like one of the (willfully) freest movies ever made. Makaveyev is a master filmmaker who was most recently found, via the Internet, as an instructor at Harvard, where one of his jobs was to "moderate" and politely sit by an undergraduate audience with Mel Gibson. Times ain't what they used to be for an anarchic, anti-ideological egghead/hedonist. Dig up SWEET MOVIE and mourn the world that could've been.