| | | The Criterion Collection.
Features: DVD
Pushing his themes of sexual liberation to their boiling point, Yugoslavian art-house provocateur Dusan Makavejev followed his international sensation WR: Mysteries of the Organism with this full-throated shriek in the face of bourgeois complacency and movie watching. Sweet Movie tackles the limits of personal and political freedom with kaleidoscopic feverishness, shuttling viewers from a gynecological beauty pageant to a grotesque food orgy with scatological, taboo-shattering glee. With its lewd abandon and sketch-comedy perversity, Sweet Movie became both a cult staple and an exemplar of the envelope pushing of 1970s cinema.
"A very bizarre arthouse oddity." Jeffrey M. Anderson, San Francisco Examiner
"One of the most challenging, shocking and provocative films of recent years...pure experience." Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
"Sweet Movie is literally sweet...a zany look at sensuality...provocative." Variety
Editor's Note
Director Makavejev's controversial SWEET MOVIE actually contains two cult-classic comedic stories. In the first story, Miss World Virginity marries wealthy industrialist Mr. Kapital who has her sterilized, rather than consummating their marriage. She runs off, has an affair and ends up in a commune. In the second story a survivor of the revolution has a sexual encounter with a sailor which ends in his murder in a vat of sugar.
Plot Summary
"Sweet Movie" is Dusan Makavejev's avant-garde vision of sexuality, communism, Nazi and Soviet atrocities, bodily functions and sweets - lots and lots of sweets.| Following two parallel plots, the film focuses first on Miss Canada, a virgin who wins a surreal beauty contest to become the wife of multi-billionaire with a golden phallus. The billionaire has her stuffed into a suitcase and shipped to Paris. She loses her virginity to a singer, falls into sexually induced shock, and after a stay with the Otto Muehl group she ultimately finds herself a model being bathed in a vat of chocolate.| The second plot features a captain of a ship bearing the head of Karl Marx on its prow. She makes love to a young sailor in a bed of sugar and kills him, mixing his blood with the sugar.
| Features | Actress Anna Prucnal Sings A Song Featured In The Film | | Audio: English Dolby Digital Mono | | Featurettes: Video Interview With Makavejev By Film Historian Peter Cowie, Actress Anna Prucnal Sings A Song Featured In The Film | | Includes A Booklet Featuring An Essay By Stanley Cavell & David Sterritt | | Interactive Menus | | New & Improved English Subtitle Translation | | New Video Interview With Makavejev By Film Historian Peter Cowie | | New, Restored High-Definition Digital Transfer, Supervised By Makavejev | | Scene Selection | | Subtitles: English |
| Technical Info
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Release Information
| | Studio: Image |
| Release Date: 6/19/2007 |
| Running Time: 98 minutes |
| Original Release Date: 1975 | | Catalog ID: 1698 | | UPC: 00715515024327 | | Number of Discs: 1 |
Audio & Video
| | Original Language: French | | Available Audio Tracks: French | | Available Subtitles: English | | Video: Color |
Aspect Ratio | | Widescreen 1.66:1 |
| Cast & Crew
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| | Professional Reviews | Sight and Sound
"Like a more phallocentric Russ Meyer flick, SWEET MOVIE revels in caricature." 09/01/2007 p.89The Spinning Image 7 of 10
Watching Sweet Movie is a bit like being taken to one of those confrontational fringe theatre plays, where radical politics are mixed with sex, scatology and the desire to shock you out of your complacency. Only this has a bigger budget (well, they were able to hire a helicopter, at least). Although it starts out fairly playfully, as it draws on there are parts which become uncomfortable to watch, such as the Marxist captain of a barge, who turns out to be like the witch who lived in the gingerbread house, luring boys into her clutches...The message of poltical and sexual liberation gets lost in a series of jarring images like the shitting competition, a sugar-coated murder or a disgusting dinner sequence. How seriously Makavejev expected anyone to take this I don't know, but there must be more coherent ways of getting your point across. Still, it's never boring. - Graeme Clark
The Onion A.V. Club 8 of 10
Sweet Movie's parade of shocking imagery (a banquet of bodily waste, gold-plated penises, sliced-up dildos served to infantile adults, a sugar-coated stripper unzipping the fly of a pre-teen boy) now seems more gross than daring, though John Waters or Lars von Trier would have to go a long way to match it for pure excess. But even Sweet Movie is of a piece with Makavejev's earlier, livelier work. The filmmaker's recurring emphasis on the fleeting pleasure of copulation matches his mockery of the authoritarian regimes that have marched through his homeland, each capturing the fancy of his people for a few promising moments before the relationship inevitably turned sour. - Noel Murray
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