Sweet Movie (1974, Dušan Makavejev) (Patreon)

31/100

It's fuddy-duddy time! Wouldn't say that Sweet Movie ever "offended" me, exactly, but as with most movies that explicitly (in both senses of the adverb) seek to shock and nauseate—Salò, La Grande Bouffe, The Night Porter, etc.—I find that the unpleasantness far outweights any ostensible insight or satirical point. Take, for example, the long and super-creepy scene in which Captain Anna seduces (and I guess later murders?) several pre-adolescent boys: I'm not someone who believes that children should never see naked adult bodies and can't handle implied sexual situations in a fictional context...but at the same time, I neither needed nor especially wanted to watch little kids look alternately horny and petrified as a woman strips in front of them and unzips one boy's fly. In my own case, at least, the discomfort isn't at all productive, and I couldn't even tell you what Makajevev meant to accomplish by provoking it (especially given that all the Captain Ann stuff was hastily added after Carole Laure understandably decided that she'd had enough and took a hike midway through production). Merely not-my-thing for about an hour, then the vomiting and shit-eating and ritualistic sugar-sex sacrifice kicks in and I had to grit my teeth through the rest. For what, exactly? The repeated inclusion of archival footage showing actual Katyn-massacre victims implies some sort of parallel to what befalls Miss Canada and/or Captain Anna's Communism-as-confection homicides, but I may be too mired in Western capitalism to get it, since nothing about the Soviet Union's mass execution of Polish officers was alluring but secretly dangerous. Saving grace is Makavejev's typical playfulness, e.g. having Miss Canada shipped to Paris in a suitcase from which she slowly extricates herself over the course of its long journey along conveyor belts and whatnot. (Laure was a real trooper here for as long as she lasted.) Having now mostly disliked four of his films, though, I think I can safely conclude that his interests and mine have little overlap.