10 Most Disturbing Films #3: Sweet Movie

Years before the so-called “cinema of transgression” reared its head, Director Dušan Makavejev, who had been exiled from Yugoslavia for directing WR: Mysteries of the Organism, set the standard in this area with his Sweet Movie. There is something to repulse and disturb all but the most jaded sensibilities in this cinematic mind bomb: urination, emetophiliac vomiting, seduction of the innocent, murder, female masturbation in a vat of chocolate (cry, “Fire!”), communal idiocy, footage of the aftermath of the Soviet Katyn Massacre of 21,000+ Polish citizens in 1940, and a boat laden with sugar boasting the head of Karl Marx on its prow. Critics were outraged. Carole Laure, who plays Miss Canada in the film’s Miss Monde 1984 contest for beautiful virgins, walked off the set in disgust. Sweet Movie was subsequently banned in Canada(!) and many other countries. Many versions of the film were butchered, something addressed with its Criterion Edition release in 2007.

Sweet Movie has also been cited as a primary inspiration by David Hanson in creating the once-shocking Hallowe’en Disturbathon event hosted annually in Dallas, Texas for almost two decades. Prior to becoming a popularized fetish/ lifestyle showcase after Hanson’s departure, Disturbathon offered catharsis through ritualized transgression and disgust.

After winning the Miss Monde 1984 contest for “the most desirable, prominent, and well-preserved virgins,” a subversive send-up of beauty pageants, Miss Canada (Carole Laure) claims the prize of marriage to Mr. Kapital, the milk tycoon, played by John Vernon (Animal House’s Dean Vernon Wormer) who sanitizes her before urinating on her with his golden penis. She is next smuggled to Paris in a suitcase, where she meets El Macho (Sami Frey), a Latin pop star. They share a raw egg and get locked in intercourse. After being carted away in tandem by medics, Miss Canada falls in with an anarchist commune that practices therapeutic idiocy (similar to the “spassing” done by The Idiots in Lars Von Trier’s later film of that name), infantilism and other sloppy rites perhaps inspired by Makavejev’s fascination with Wilhelm Reich. Notably and logically, Otto Muehl of the Viennese Actionists appears in a moronic cameo here. When we next see Miss Canada, she is sploshing in chocolate for a television commercial, the culmination of the comingling of sex and capital in her life.

Next, the scene switches to the incredible candy-boat Survival, piloted through Amsterdam’s canals by the beautiful Anna Planeta (Anna Prucnal). After taking a sailor on as passenger, Planeta seduces him and then stabs him through the heart as they frolic in a bin filled with sugar. Later, she woos children on board and they meet a similar fate. We later see their tiny bodies, wrapped in plastic by the police, but they experience an unexplained resurrection and wander off from their bodies.

In his 1975 review upon the film’s New York release at the D.W. Griffith Theater, Vincent Canby sneered,”For a film so full of concern for the political and social sanity of man. "Sweet Movie" is, paradoxically, élitist. If one doesn't share Mr. Makavejev's knowldege of the history of Communism and Reichian psychology, much of it is incomprehensible.”

While many revile this film and its excesses, Makavejev is offering, among the nested horrors, a vision of transgressive, hedonistic freedom in his depiction of the communal banquet and ceremonies, albeit one that may not appeal to more than a few exotic freaks. Despite the bitching and grousing, Sweet Movie is an important film that takes many measured risks. Watching it more than three decades after its release, one can only be reminded that today’s filmic efforts suffer from more repression and censorship than was the case in the 1970s.

10 Most Disturbing Films: #1 Possession by Andrzej Zulawski

Director Andrzej Zulawski took all of the chaos, rage and confusion of his divorce and rolled it into this nasty treat. Though some insist that this incredibly intense drama doesn't qualify as a horror movie, the film's most notable sequences (of which there are many) all partake of the horrific, one way or another. That this has consigned a brilliant drama to a genre ghetto is regrettable but not altogether unappropriate.



Isabelle Adjani, who won a Gold Palm at Cannes for her unbelievably intense performance, plays Anna, a woman who is ready to divorce her husband Mark, a traveling spy based in Cold War Berlin, played despairingly by Sam Neill. Nor is she content with her strange lover, Heinrich, who is spastically eccentric and into occult sexual energy theories. It seems that the men in her life are driving her mad. But this doesn't quite explain what happens next as Anna gives birth in a subway tunnel to what turns out to be her own tentacled demon-lover.

There are many layers and possible interpretations to this film. In 1981, I saw the badly slashed 80 minute American release at the theater. I found it to be nonsensically disturbing and very hard to follow. It left me with that,"What the fuck?" feeling. Later, when I came across the Anchor Bay version that restored 30 minutes of plot, many of my questions still remained unanswered. There is much that is deliberately left open-ended and this, in many ways, increases the impact of the film, much in the same way that David Lynch's more obtuse efforts do. One is left to fill in the missing pieces with one's imagination.

With all of the horrific elements in play, it's hard to believe that the deepest impact comes from seeing a marriage disintegrate so spectacularly. This is the film's central horror, the dark, beating heart of the story. And it is a testament to the power of Zulawski's artistry and personal vision that Possession transcends the gimmickry-and-frisson that typifies horror cinema, even as it ultimately relies on that genre for marketing. The performances of Adjani and Neill are so strong and convey such excessive emotional turmoil that viewers may find it all quite exhausting. The experience is so involving and the acting so convincing that the appearance of the devilish love-squid squirming and pumping Anna in flagrante delicto almost seems like a natural development or even a lesser horror.

As if all this weren't quite enough, Adjani and Neill play their own dopplegangers, there is an open-ended espionage plot concerning a dangerous man with pink socks, and an ominous, eschatological ending coupled with unforgettable sounds. It's safe to say that there is no other film like Possession.

In "The Theater and Its Double," Antonin Artaud wrote a prescription that seems to have been filled by cinema in this case:

"I propose then a theater in which violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theater as by a whirlwind of high forces. A theater which, abandoning psychology, recounts the extraordinary, stages natural conflicts, natural and subtle forces, and presents itself first of all as an exceptional power of redirection. A theater that induces trance, as the dances of Dervishes induce trance, and that addresses itself to the organism by precise instruments, by the same means as those of certain tribal music cures which we admire in records but are incapable of originating among ourselves."

Because of its undeniable impact, bizarre vision, and depth that merits repeat viewings, Possession seizes the top spot on this list of Most Disturbing Films with its amorous tentacles.