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
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 | sexual politics | orgy | sex with a minor | vaginal sex | 

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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:

CAD 700,000 (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

Because of her role in the film, Anna Prucnal was exiled from her native Poland for 7 years. The government even denied her a visa to see her dying mother.

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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 Hagan Reviews: Eat the Schoolgirl (2012)

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Soundtracks

Les enfants dans les champs
Music and Lyrics by Manos Hadjidakis
Performed by Maria Katira

User Reviews

the overall impact is like a sugar rush- a good high and a big crash with a few moments of extra sweetness...

...and if that statement makes sense, you should see this movie! This is a very funny movie for its first half, because one-of-a-kind director Dusan Makavejev populates his mess of randomness with the same docu-in-your-face absurdity and crude outrageous view of sex that his best film, WR, had. We meet Mr. Kapital (John Vernon, of all people, though it is not his own genitals used when the character is seen on camera with them dipped in gold) who brushes a napkin across his daughter (if it is his daughter, maybe his girlfriend, played by Carole Laure) on one side of the super loose narrative-side, and on the other Potemkin Sailor (ho-ho), who takes on board a stray, even though to have sex with her will lead to certain death.

Then there's also Jeremiah Muscle, who flaunts his black snake like it's nobody's business but the lady's, and a Hispanic singing sensation (on record only, of course, as he makes a music video with the backdrop of the Eifel tower, leading to getting stuck with another women in the act), all mixed up in a crazy lot of scenes that emphasize phallus imagery, the female form, and bright, primary colors- as Makavejev put it "a love letter to Kodak".

This isn't to say the film doesn't take more than a little- actually quite a lot of- work on the viewer to know what the hell is going on. Like WR, the director throws in a few times throughout some real found-documentary footage, only this time without much relevance to the film that the director has made around it (albeit the song used in the clips is excellent). And yet for the first half of Sweet Movie this isn't of a terrible concern, at least for one knowing that the unexpected and anarchic is all in tasteless fun. It's is a little like if there was a rogue Marxist (i.e. the awesome pipe Kapital has, and the ship's main mast) who got kicked out of Monty Python and was obsessed with genitals and went off and made an independent film.

That is, for the first half, anyway. After this, when Miss Canada/1984/whomever runs into the commune group- this is where, all of a sudden, the randomness of tasteless acts starts to try one's patience. I can even see what Makavejev was going for here without trying to add to much meaning to what it all is: the disgusting depravity with food, vomiting, infantilism, nudity, barbarism of communism as satire. But it just goes on for much too long; where the first half had little stabs of wild wit, this, along with the long sequence with Anna Planeta around the young boys, soon fall flat not because of there not being any cohesive narrative structure, but because they just aren't as captivating, or hilarious, as what came before.

It might be a tough act to follow such a crafty and controversial hybrid like WR Mysteries of the Organism, but Makavejev's method of throwing caution completely into the wind soon starts to reel into the tedious, with the exception of the sugar sex scene and Laure's naked chocolate session, which are some of the best scenes in the film. This being noted, the shards that do work in Sweet Movie make it a somewhat worthwhile viewing; certainly for those who are die-hard avant-garde cineasts Sweet Movie marks as something like an X-rated milkshake- lots and lots of nudity and pushing-the-line sexual acts done to a style that can only come out of a man with a real vision at work.

What it is precisely I can't quite say. It is, at the least, an 'experience' of its time and mood. That it's not the sort of work one would want to watch it again from start to finish for quite a long time (unlike WR) is its biggest sort of drawback.