‘Sweet Movie’: when controversially surreal eroticism doesn’t live up to the title
There are few films out there that spark simultaneous feelings of awe and disgust. As the final frame fades to black, you debate whether or not the filmmaker intended for you to feel nauseous and shortly decide that regardless of whether they wanted audiences to throw up, it’s a marvellous achievement to provoke such a visceral reaction.
From this description you might recall the polarising impact of Raw, Daisies or if you have a really strong stomach, Salo: 120 Days of Solom. I have a terribly weak stomach but have yet to actually be sick after watching a film, although I’ve definitely been close after watching many of these, with the shrimp scene from The Substance nearly prompting such an outburst. But there is one film with a deceivingly harmless title that goes against all the assumptions you might have about it, disguised as an erotic drama but with a deliciously disturbing core.
Sweet Movie, directed by Dušan Makavejev in 1974, has two different storylines occurring at the same time, both equally disgusting as each other. One of them follows a beauty queen whose life descends into chaos after winning a virginity contest and being forced into marriage, later having sex with a singer who gets stuck inside her and moving to a strange community of people who constantly throw up. The other storyline follows a singer who is also a paedophilic killer, travelling through the canals of Amsterdam in search of people to have sex with before killing them in a pool of sugar.
While the storylines sound strange and perhaps unrelated, Makavejev subtly weaved political commentary between each story strand to create a critique of communism and the animalistic nature of the human condition, with both being allegories of the horrors of both. The director is from Yugoslavia, and many of the political strands come from the fact that Yugoslavia was a communist country at the time, with complex symbolism that is shown through absurd imagery and shocking storylines.
Everything about Sweet Movie is explicit and controversial, hitting back at the restrictions placed on creatives and using shock value to exaggerate his message about the ideals forced onto his country. He destroys each of these ideals through heightened and grotesque scenarios, with the singer having sex on a boat with the face of Karl Marx painted onto it as a single tear falls from his watchful eye. The idea of class and civility is all destroyed through sexual degradation as the women free themselves of these oppressive standards and find themselves in increasingly gross situations that go against every expectation of how they should behave.
After its release, it was labelled as depraved by many people, with one of the actors in the film, Anna Prucnal, even being exiled from her home country for seven years as a result of her role in the film and denied a VISA to visit her dying mother.
However, there have been countless other filmmakers who have been condemned like this, with Pier Paolo Pasolini even being murdered for one of his films and directors like John Waters, Peter Greenaway, and Norifumi Suzuki being labelled as repulsive and obscene.
But this has never deterred true creativity, and if anything, it helps it thrive. Sometimes, the lack of praise or attention only provokes us to be more outrageous and helps people like Makavejev further push the creative boundaries and push everyone’s buttons.
