Sweet Movie

Sweet Movie relies upon vulgar spectacles in order to receive favorable attention or any sort of critical uproar; this an unavoidable reality of Makavejev's cinema. If one were to remove a majority of the vulgar or provocative imagery from this film, we would be left with an anarchic vision of the world, full of heavy-handed political and economic metaphors, as well as a slew of liberal gut-reactions to fascism and sexual repression. There is a typical sort of critical cop-out here as well, in saying that Sweet Movie is dismissed for the wrong reasons. It's not so much that the film's vulgarity is stupid, rather that it's absymal stupidity is vulgar. Shooting footage of a Wilhelm Reich inspired commune, in which the member play with their food, shit, and urine, is not brilliant provocation or sexually liberating; it's just footage of a bunch of moronic savages with rather childlike, Rousseauian ideals of personal freedom, playing with their own waste and acting like children. The problem here isn't even so much a question of the vulgarity of all of this. What's truly insulting is how so many critics and scholars feel compelled to defend such a mindless spectacle under the assumption that a bunch Makavejev's rather vague thematic obsessions are brilliantly intentional, or even insightful. Sweet Movie embodies the most idiotic fixations of counterculture cinema; it's a deliberately vulgar spectacle of retarded sexuality, chalk full of childish political ideals and bad metaphors. It's really no surprise that this man made a documentary about Wilhelm Reich. This film almost makes William Klein's Mr. Freedom seem brilliant in comparison.