Pleading Insanity

By JAY COCKS

SWEET MOVIE

Directed and Written by DUSAN MAKAVEJEV

Sweet Movie was shown two years ago at the Cannes Film Festival. Since then it has acquired a justifiably vile reputation. A sort of live-action animated cartoon, the movie is a paean to the joys of insanity. Should there be any mistaking this intent, Director Dusan Makavejev (who made another Reichian parable, WR--Mysteries of the Organism) includes a little ditty with the refrain, "It's a joy to be crazy/ Good to be sad.../ Good to practice deadly sin/ To be alive and to win." Irony, if intended, is imperceptible.

Lusty Creatures. In its original incarnation, Sweet Movie included a scene in which some performers devour excrement. This precedent-shattering interlude has been removed. Still remaining is a sequence in which a character called Captain Anna Planeta (Anna Prucnal) strips in front of some eight-year-old boys and starts to unzip the fly of one wondering youngster. Presumably this will bring the boys' sexuality to abrupt flower and turn them into lusty, life-embracing creatures.

Sweet Movie has no pretenses at plot, although it does make an attempt to chart the smarmy adventures of a certain Miss World 1984 (played by a lovely Canadian actress called Carole Laure). Future chroniclers of the humiliations inflicted on women in the cinema will find prime source material in Sweet Movie. En route to her exalted madness, Miss World is showered with golden urine from her new husband's gilded member; raped by a muscleman; packed into a valise and shipped to Paris, where she is raped again, this time by one El Macho, and sent out with the garbage; relegated to some sort of free-floating madhouse whose inmates per form assorted atrocities with food; and, finally, made to roll naked in a vat of melted chocolate.

There are also a great many political asides, all having to do with the various and inclusive insanities of Marxism, capitalism and fascism. All are denounced, while liberation through mad ness is stoutly championed. Sweet Movie, full of unenlightened lunacy, is not really a film at all. It is a social disease.

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