"Sweet Movie"(1974)d/Dušan Makavejev

During my adolescent years, I first got wind of this strange and controversial Yugoslavian rarity through one of the VHS bootleggers I used to deal with, and my curiosity was further sparked by later mentions from trusted genre writers in various publications I regularly flipped through.It wasn't until last night, though, when I finally got the opportunity to screen this one for myself, thanks to the folks at Criterion and Doc's all-encompassing current NetFlix queue.If you're not into all the footage of exhumation of the 22,000 estimated mass graves containing Polish nationals executed by Russian troops on the order of Joseph Stalin contained within, there's always plenty of simulated and unsimulated coprophilia, emetophilia, genital fondling, teat-suckling, and implied paedophilia for you to wrap your glassies around, and if there's one thing that enhances a movie experience, it's seeing John "Animal House" Vernon pissing on-camera out of his erect dick, painted gold for effect.Yeah, not really.Anna Prucnal, the blonde actress who's center of the second narrative, which Makavejev was forced to write when lead actress Carol Laure up and quit after having to fondle a guy's bare uncircumsized junk on-screen (the last straw for her, after enduring several unsavory acts her character performs in the script), was banned from re-entering her native Poland for years after authorities deemed the movie both pornographic and anti-communist in nature.C'mon fellas, those are two of my own finest qualities.Though I was mostly unimpressed with the movie, there are some brilliant sequences with rich visual style contained herein that I'd be upset about never getting to experience if I hadn't watched in the first place.So effective, they are, that I'd revisit them separately in the future.Forwards towards, me hearties.

"Why you gotta flash me yer beaver, lady?Can't you see I'm on the shoe?"
First, we're introduced to Miss Canada(Carol Laure), as she wins a Most Virginal contest, as determined by a gynecologist on stage(Miss Yugoslavia is a burly broad who body slams him into the examination chair), winning a lucrative marriage to an eccentric milk tycoon named Mr. Kapital(John Vernon) who introduces her to the joys of matrimony on their wedding night by whipping out his gold-painted hard on and taking a whiz on her while his creepy old mother and a band of hippes garbed like religious leaders serenade the couple from outside.Embarrassed by Dean Wormser's weiner, she relates a desire to split to Kapital's mom who nearly drowns her before leaving her to the black musclehead(Roy Callender) who serves as family bodyguard.He jumps rope naked and stuffs her into a suitcase(!), which ends up on the Eiffel Tower, where a film starring a Latin lothario named El Macho(Sami Frey) is being filmed.She soon falls prey to his animal magnetism and they have sex right there on the landmark, but a group of touring nuns interrupt their coitus and scare them into a state of penis captivus(he gets stuck inside her!!).After being freed from the ahem, liplock, by French painter/writer Roland Topor, she finds herself in a therapy commune of artists led by Otto Muehl, where she breastfeeds from a lactating hippie, and after a particularly gross meal sans utensils, one of the other members experiences a rebirth of sorts, crying like a baby, pissing and shitting while the others pamper him.Finally, we see her writhing naked in a pool of liquid chocolate for a film crew.Clearly, this is not an ad for Godiva chocolates...or is it.

Choleric over her character's on-camera uncut cock-coddling, Carole was compelled to quit.
The second intercut narrative deals with a failed communist revolutionary named Anna Planeta(Anna Prucnal), who captains a massive, gaudy boat full of candy (with an enormous papier-mache Karl Marx head on the prow, mind you) down a river, where she spots a sailor named Potemkin(Pierre Clémenti) pissing in broad daylight on the shore and opts to give him a lift.After they reminisce and joyously sing old commie songs together, she warns him not to fall in love with her, else she'll be forced to kill him.Potemkin ignores her warnings and pleas to leave the ship, and ends up putting the blocks to her in a hanging nest full of sugar, after which she bites his granule-covered skin, drawing blood, and shanks him in the labonza repeatedly, twirling the blade and mixing the sweet substance with his red red kroovy.She warned you, pal.Her next passengers are a group of adolescent boys who she seduces with candy, stripping off her garments and teasing them with her nakedness.In the end, she's apprehended and hauled off by the authorities as police officers lay plastic sacks containing the childrens' lifeless bodies on the shore in front of a crowd of terrified onlookers.Later, when the crowd has dispersed, we see the children rising from the plastic like butterflies from their cocoons, reborn.

Potemkin(Pierre Clémenti)'s pelvis is promptly perforated while plunged in a cistern of sugar.
Say what you will about Sweet Movie, but you could never accuse it of being boring.A little excessive, like locking yourself in the hall closet with a box of candy bars, but those aforementioned sequences make it a worthwhile viewing, both visually stunning and thought provoking(I got a kick out of the vintage stock footage of baby gymnastics.Baby gymnastics, really?), truly a tightrope balance of exploitative elements and museum quality art.Definitely not for everyone, especially not those individuals whose minds are on lockdown from the bizarre, perverse, and the absurd.Laure's choco-nudity is liable to leave you Yugo-slobberin' for more, while Prucnal's scene with the boys will most likely disturb you deeply.Or leave you itchy, one or the other.Both women have gone on to successful singing careers, with Laure continuing to act in French television and films all along.On the scale, it earns two Wops, mainly because I can't see myself ever compelled to watch it again for any reason.After seeing it once, I can't imagine many of you will either.

If they made this outta chocolate, I'd be in a hyperosmolar nonketotic coma by now.