Sweet Movie is a 1974 surrealist comedy-drama film written and directed by Yugoslavian filmmaker Dušan Makavejev.

An international co-production of companies from France, Canada, and West Germany, the film follows two women: a Canadian beauty queen, who represents a modern commodity culture, and a captain aboard a ship laden with candy and sugar, who is a failed communist revolutionary.

Plot
The first narrative follows Miss Monde 1984/Miss Canada, who wins a contest of the "most virgin"; her prize is the marriage to a milk industry tycoon. However, following his degrading puritanical introduction to intercourse, she vents her intention to leave to her mother-in-law who, at that point, nearly has her killed. The family bodyguard takes her away, further humiliates her, and finally packs her in a trunk bound for Paris. She finds herself on the Eiffel Tower, where she absently meets and has intercourse with a Latin singer, El Macho. The sexual act is interrupted by touring nuns who frighten the lovers into penis captivus. In her post-coital shocked state, she is adopted into an artist community led by Otto Muehl, where she finds affectionate care. The commune practices some liberating sessions, where a member, with the assistance of the others, goes through a (re)birth experience, cries, urinates and defecates like a baby, while the others are cleaning and pampering him. Later she is seen acting for a television advertisement, in which she is naked, covered in liquid chocolate, striking seductive poses and finally drowned in the chocolate.

The second narrative involves a woman, Anna Planeta, piloting a candy-filled boat in the canals of Amsterdam with a large papier-mâché head of Karl Marx on the prow. She picks up the hitchhiking sailor Potemkin, though she warns him that if he falls in love, she will kill him. He ignores her many suggestions for him to leave and their relationship evolves. In the state of love making, she stabs him to death in their nidus of sugar. She then seduces children into her world of sweets and revolution, eventually getting arrested by the Dutch police who lay down plastic sacks containing the children's bodies on the side of the canal—implying they too have been murdered by Planeta. The film ends with the children, unseen by the others, being reborn from their plastic cocoons.

Cast
 Carole Laure as Miss Monde 1984/Miss Canada
 John Vernon as Mr. Kapital
 Jane Mallett as PDG/Chastity Belt Lady
 Roy Callender as Jeremiah Muscle
 Sami Frey as El Macho
 Anna Prucnal as Anna Planeta/Captain Ann
 Pierre Clémenti as Potemkin Sailor
 Otto Muehl as Member of Therapie-Komune
 Marpessa Dawn as Mama Communa
 Roland Topor
 George Melly
 Catherine Sola
 Sabine Haudepin
 Robin Gammell
 Vivian Vachon

Production
The film was originally intended to focus solely on the experiences of Miss Canada. However, the actress portraying the character, Carole Laure, left the production after becoming increasingly disgusted over the actions required for her performance; she decided to quit after shooting a scene in which she fondled a man's penis on-screen. After Laure's departure, Makavejev rewrote the script to include the second narrative, starring Anna Prucnal.

Reception
The film created a storm of controversy upon its release, with scenes of coprophilia, emetophilia, implied child molestation, and footage of remains of the Polish Katyn Massacre victims. The film was banned in many countries, including the United Kingdom, or severely cut. Polish authorities banned Prucnal from using her passport over the film, which effectively banned her from entering her native country for a number of years. 

Makavejev said: "After Sweet Movie it was as if I had burned all my bridges. I just lost the chance to talk to producers."

Critical response
Sweet Movie received mixed reviews from critics. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 50% approval rating based on 22 reviews, with an average rating of 5.4/10.

American philosopher Steven Shaviro commented that, in Sweet Movie, Makavejev went where no filmmaker had gone but the film is "too intellectual to be ecstatic [and] too visceral to be theorizable", and that "certain questions [Sweet Movie] asks simply can't be answered", such as whether the practices seen in Otto Muehl's commune were genuinely liberating or forced by the commune's groupthink.

Home media
The film was nearly impossible to find since its initial release in 1974, but The Criterion Collection released the film on DVD in a region 1 DVD on June 19, 2007.

See also
W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism
List of mainstream films with unsimulated sex

References

External links
 
 
 Commentary by Lorraine Mortimer
Sweet Movie: Wake Up! an essay by David Sterritt at the Criterion Collection

1974 films
West German films
1970s English-language films
English-language French films
English-language German films
1970s French-language films
1970s Italian-language films
1970s Polish-language films
1970s Spanish-language films
1970s avant-garde and experimental films
1974 comedy-drama films
Films about sexual repression
French avant-garde and experimental films
French comedy-drama films
Canadian avant-garde and experimental films
Canadian comedy-drama films
German avant-garde and experimental films
German comedy-drama films
Films about anarchism
Films about child sexual abuse
Films about pedophilia
Films about food and drink
Films about beauty queens
Films directed by Dušan Makavejev
Censored films
Obscenity controversies in film
Films about rape
Cultural depictions of Karl Marx
Films scored by Manos Hatzidakis
Roland Topor
1974 multilingual films
French multilingual films
Canadian multilingual films
German multilingual films
1970s Canadian films
1970s French films
1970s German films