Sweet Movie (1974) - The Criterion Collection

Synopsis

Pushing his themes of sexual liberation to their boiling point, Yugoslavian art-house provocateur Dušan Makavejev followed his international sensation WR: Mysteries of the Organism with this full-throated shriek in the face of bourgeois complacency and movie watching. Sweet Movie tackles the limits of personal and political freedom with kaleidoscopic feverishness, shuttling viewers from a gynecological beauty pageant to a grotesque food orgy with scatological, taboo-shattering glee. With its lewd abandon and sketch-comedy perversity, Sweet Movie became both a cult staple and exemplar of the envelope pushing of 1970s cinema.

Cast

Miss World 1984	Carole Laure
A sailor from the Potemkin	Pierre Clementi
Capt. Anna Planeta	Anna Prucnal
El Macho	Sami Frey
Director General of the Chastity Belt Foundation	Jane Mallet
Mama Communa	Marpessa Dawn
Themselves	Otto Muehl
	the members of the Therapy Commune, Vienna
Jeremiah Muscle	Roy Callender

Credits

Director	Dušan Makavejev
Screenplay	Dušan Makavejev
Cinematography	Pierre Lhomme
Music	Manos Hadjidakis
Editing	Yann Dedet

Disc Features

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION

New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Dušan Makavejev
New video interviews with Makavejev and Balkan film scholar Dina Iordanova
Actress Anna Prucnal sings a song from the film
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A booklet featuring new essays by critic David Sterritt and Harvard professor and philosopher Stanley Cavell

From the Current

Sweet Movie: Wake Up!

by David Sterritt Jun 18, 2007

Whatever you’ve heard about Sweet Movie, the audacious and outrageous political comedy by Yugoslav filmmaker Dušan Makavejev, there’s a good chance it’s wrong.Ever since...