Montenegro
Tags: comedy

Plot synopsis:
Marianne Faithfull sings "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" over the opening credit sequence.
Marilyn Jordan (Susan Anspach) is a bored, depressed American housewife, married to a rich Swedish businessman with two seemingly perfect children. She tries to "spice up" her existence by surprising the family when she eats their entire dinner, setting the bedclothes on fire and poisoning the pet dog's milk and then advising it not to drink (the dog does not drink). Eventually Martin, Marilyn's husband, decides to show her to a psychiatrist, but that only serves to further her frustration.
One day, when she decides to accompany her husband on a business trip, Marilyn gets detained by security at the airport on a technicality. After missing her plane, she is befriended by a group of Serbs and is taken to a club they run, bearing the odd name of "Zanzi-Bar." There, Marilyn indulges in their fantastic, surreal world of shovel fighting, lamb roasting, striptease and free love. It all culminates with Marilyn having a passionate fling with a young man named Montenegro (Svetozar Cvetkovic) who works in a zoo.
After spending the night with Montenegro, Marilyn realizes that even though she adores this world, she is a stranger in it. Completely snapping upon this realization, she kills the young man and returns home. Once there, she serves her family a gourmet dinner, followed by a light dessert of fruit, which a caption announces is poisoned. The final intertitle states: "The story was based on real events".

Review: It is funny, very erotic, passionate, and riddled with jabs into society's snobbish attitude toward sexual fulfillment A very wealthy American woman is married to a dull Swedish businessman When the husband is about to leave for Brazil, she decides to go along with him, but is held up in customs and misses the plane Trying to get back home, she is caught up in the life-style of a group of vibrant Yugoslavian immigrants living in Sweden She falls in love with the peculiar manners of the group and decides to stay for a couple of days, ending up in a romantic affair with one of the workers, singing in a topless bar, and having a lot of fun In contrast to Makavejev's other noteworthy films, "WRMysteries of the Organism" and "Sweet Movie," "Montenegro" is light and uncomplicated...
It's a simple story simply told The message is the samesexual repression leads to insanity, but sensual indulgence livens the spirit "Montenegro" does not exploit its eroticism; it lets it grow out of the situation, out of the characters When Susan Anspach is seen taking a shower, it is photographed in a very beautiful, soft manner...
Others who have commented on 'Montenegro' seem to miss the film's point.
'Montenegro' takes effete, overbaked, hypersophisticated, irrelevant Western sensibilities & turns them smack on their pointed little heads.American Marliyn Jordan (Susan Anspach in a tour de force performance) lives in Sweden with her Swedish husband.
Marilyn is not, as other commentators have misapprehended, a bored, psychotic housewife - she's a woman who, in her overbaked Western milieu of mind-blenching affluence, oversensitive men & women, diplomatic euphemism, & arcane, costly, "necessary", psychobabble (brilliantly depicted, & sent up, in the analysis scene), has lost touch with all that's primal, urgent, & vital in herself.Already whacked out from living in her gilded, padded, safe-till-she's-numbed life, Jordan impulsively hooks up with a completely primal, totally up front & no bones about it, caveman & club bunch of howling, lusty Montenegrans.
Once she's with them things happen very differently from the way they failed to happen in her previous ersatz saccharine-junkie life.Jordan is in for keeps with people who play for keeps.
Lust, blood, sex, ooze, vendettas, vengeance - all the primal, classical, down-deep-in-human-nature emotions & their instantaneous acting-out - are how things are for Jordan now in Montenegro.
All that's out the window in 'Montenegro' with Marilyn Jordan fast losing her melancholia & madness, & rushing headlong into shameless, unbridled lust, man-baiting, cat-fighting, & knock-down (with that caveman club!) & drag out sex.Watching 'Montenegro' we Westerners are intrigued, repelled, fascinated, revolted - but we can't turn away from the fluids & furze, the basal & nasal sensation, the genitals-out-in-the-winds-of-Fate abandon, & the cathartic, orgasmic, lethal, & vital primordial reckoning that is 'Montenegro' exploding on our retinae, in our ears, on our skin, in our nostrils, & in our wide-open mouths.One wonders if Camille Paglia has seen 'Montenegro' because one expects she'd love it, because this film delves into things primal that Paglia's betes noires - radical gender feminist ideologues - reject and label "patriarchal violence against women" & "not women's way of knowing".
Let's just say that 'Montenegro' isn't likely to be high on Gloria Steinem's, Patricia Ireland's, or Susan Sontag's list of all-time favorite films.
That alone tells how worthy this film is of wide open embrace & enjoyment: 'Montenegro' doesn't cave or cop to salon intellectualism, pop psychology, Botox beauty, animal rights activist solipsism, or moral relativism.
This is the real deal: down to brass tacks humanity stripped of culture & deodorant & Sani-Pure flush toilets & sparkling bidets & layers of insulation from the Real.'Montenegro' isn't Greek Tragedy, it's not Shakespearian artistry, & it sure isn't Frank Capra or Spike Lee - it's pure primal, take no prisoners, heads-on-lances, bareass naked human nature turning back the clock & stripping away the veneer of Western propriety.
'Monetenegro' gives us a pungent whiff of how we smell without deodorant, look without makeup, feel without politically correct "civilized" Thought Police cues, touch with unwashed hands, & taste blood-rare meat without first checking to be sure our side of veggies is certified to be "organic", washed, or attractively presented.
Nobody calls for a cop in Montenegro, watches Oprah, or cares less what Dr. Phil advises; nobody hails a waiter without ducking for the dagger that will come hurtling his way; & nobody bats an eyelash without understanding up front that it means, "Come hither: Now!" In 'Montenegro' nobody trifles with food & wine & sex & death because they're the stuff of everyday life - life on the edge, life in the Now, into which Marliyn Jordan, body & soul, hurls herself..
With Marianne Faithful singing her signature "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" tune, I just knew that the premise of this song was somehow linked to this movie.
I won't bore you with the synopsis of this film as others have already done this, what I will tell you is this is probably one of the most cleverly made movies I have seen in years.
All sorts of social commentaries can be concluded about this movie, but having owned a copy of the film and viewing it on numerous occasions, each screening presents a different interpretation.
What still blows me away is the closing scene of the movie, even after all this time and myself and friends have sat around a dinner table discussing what does it "really all mean".
Each glass of Merlot presented even more outrageous takes like the movie itself.
10/10 to Susan Anspach, director Dusan and hats off to the two young support players who play Susans children, the talent is all class.
Do yourself a favor and watch this movie for the wild ride that it is, even just to experience the wonderful unpredictable ending......I'd love to know what you all think..
From the director of Sweet Movie and The Coca-Cola Kid, this English-language film is very reminiscent of the latter (which was made four years later).
The film's most memorable bit involves an exotic dancer dodging a remote-control tank armed with a dildo.
The story involves a wife (Susan Anspach) who tries to catch up with her husband (Erland Josephson, RIP) as he boards a flight.
There she meets up with a Yugoslavian immigrant, with whom she attempts to catch a ride home.
I'd rank it a ways below The Coca-Cola Kid, but it's well worth checking out..
A quirky black comedy about a bored housewife in Sweden who spends some time with a group of Yugoslavian gypsies.
Anspach, in perhaps her best role, looks great and is terrific as the woman who's slowly going to pieces and must get away from home to regain her sanity.
The film is full of loony characters and bizarre situations but it has a strangely endearing quality to it.
The scenes at Zanzi Bar, where the Yugoslav characters reside in a Boheminian lifestyle, are brimming with raw sensuality, helped by Zachrisson as an Earth-mother and Gelin as a young prostitute.
Montenegro Black Humor At Its Best.
The movie is rather captivating in the way it teases you with the sexiness of the main character.
The sex scenes were tasteful for an early 80's film and the lure of the folk like style of the people displayed the fact that she was less naive then they were.
The last part seemed like a joke that sealed the blackness of the film.
I watched it with my wife and found the tension of what they would do to the lead character as she went deeper into their world almost unbearable.
Little did I know it was the opposite.Great movie that holds up well through time..
Anspach delivers a personal best as a housewife on the brink of insanity who befriends a band of eccentrics at the Zanzi Bar.
An hilarious and weird sex comedy from Dusan Makavejev, about an bored, neurotic American woman married into an insane and yet strangely uninteresting Swedish family, who finds release in a group of randy, freedom-loving (if scruffy) Yugoslavian immigrants.
Susan Anspach makes the most of her leading role, and is better than I've ever seen her before.
One of the best movies you never heard of..
This is a nihilist black comedy about the emptiness of success and riches.Susan Anspach is an American housewife, 40ish, married to a rich Swede, and living in a palatial Stockholm seaside residence.
Gradually, her behavior is becoming more and more erratic.When she is denied permission to board a plane to Brazil (because she tried to carry oversized gardening shears on board), she falls in with some struggling Yugoslavian immigrants, and is attracted by their zestful, lusty craziness.This movie is completely nihilistic.
(There's even a dysfunctional clock homage to Dali's "Persistence of Memory")This is one odd movie, but I liked it a lot.
One cannot expect the characters to behave as people really would, but the movie is energetic and hilarious in sections, erotic in other sections, and the production values are impressive.This was made in 1981.
The director never really made a brilliant movie, but he should have.
Susan Anspach is beautiful and delirious (must've been the acting lessons from Jack Nicholson), Marianne Faithfull singing "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" was a stroke of brilliance, and the scene of the husband prancing around the Danish moderne bedroom with his psychiatrist and his wife, wearing nothing but matching bathrobes juxtaposed to the gypsy basting the roast with the beer he's drinking is one of the most memorable scenes.I'd own this but there are children in the house.
Great acting.Great script.The story is quirky and pulls you in.The mixture of "conventional Sweden", the ex-patriot wife, and the Balkan immigrant community creates a powerful tension.Wonderful photography/editing,And charming theme song, thanks to Shel Silverstein.
Susan Anspach is a knockout in portraying the dislocated housewife amidst the bizarre immigrants of the Zanzibar.It is an example of why small, independent films rule over the excesses of Hollywood garbage..
This film was darn good in spite of the fact that almost all of the characters behave in utterly incomprehensible ways.
Marilyn Jordan (Susan Anspach) was at least characterized as a bit of a loon from the beginning.
Some really fine acting here, Anspach most notably, but also just about all of the Yugoslavian actors, none of whom had I ever heard of before.
I'll have to check and see if she has made other English-language films..
Weird, Non-Sense and Bizarre Black Humor Comedy.
In Stockholm, the American Marilyn Jordan (Susan Anspach) is a woman married with the Swedish Martin Jordan (Erland Josephson), having two children and a nice house.
She is bored with her life and presents some traces of insanity.
One day, after an incident in the airport, when her husband intended to travel to Recife, she meets a group of Yugoslavians, goes with them to a strange night-club, has an affair with a guy (Montenegro  Svetozar Cvetkovic) who treats animals and comes back home with some fruits and a `big' surprise.
This movie is a very weird, non-sense and bizarre black humor comedy.
Although being awarded in Brazil, in the São Paulo Film Festival, I did not like it.
a wonderful black comedy.
it's a wonderful black comedy i have recently seen.the entire cast, direction are absolutely brilliant.especially, i want to mention characters named "marylin", "montenegro", maryline's son and daughter.
their acting are really good to me.special scenes which i like in this movies are when marylin sings under the cuburd at her kitchen, she mixed poisons in her dog's milk,the airport scenes, the shower scene of montenegro and marylin, and the arrival of marylin to her family.especially, i think characters named "marylin" and "montenegro" are nicely depicted in this movie.the bizarre, facial, slight abnormal expressions of maryline are quite brilliant and absolutely i like the character montenegro with his charming face and beautiful personality.well, it's not the movie for everyone but obviously it's a worth-watching movie.i rate this movie 8 out of 10..
An interesting enough film to watch, it is very unusual, yet it is not really satisfying stuff.
There is a great song, sung by Marianne Faithful, which is added into the mix very well, but the mix is awfully hard to make sense of, and it is even difficult to tell if the film is trying to be a comedy or a drama.
I am actually fully uncertain of what to make of this film - whether it is good or whether it is bad.
To say this movie is weird, is an understatement.
But that's what makes this great character study of a film, intriguing, with just the right amount of sex and nudity, complimented by an intriguing weirdness and stylishness.
Though it's that early pier scene, that stays in my mind, the great Anspach who just commands the screen, with each scene she's in, plays an insanely bored rich little wife, who husband's neglect has worsened to the point of making her completely tipped over.
Getting in a bit of strife at the airport, where she's separated from hubby, and ending up with some "not your typical but exciting immigrants", she happily embarks on a rejuvenating adventure with some pretty saucy scenes, some you can well tell, have been toned down.
The bizarre yet tragic ending based on fact, is the high point of this whole film, which if far from perfect, but one movie experience, you must indulge once, if even just for the great Anspach.
....Is the best way to describe this movie.
The storyline seems to me to be a rather weak way to tie together the sex scenes, which outside a porno are some of the raunchiest 80's Hollywood will have to offer (and both female and male frontal nudity).Outside of this, the storyline is typical and utterly predictable.
Rich, bored Northern European housewife seeks excitement and sexual fulfillment somewhere primal and vibrant: in this case Yugoslavian immigrants (specifically shown to be Serbian and Montenegrin).Of course this message is debasing to both cultures involved.
Mrs. Jordan is a rich house wife.
She got all the things that maybe all of us need: a family, a couple of kids, a palatial house by the sea...
But the movie shows the emptiness of her life: she is bored, she doesn't like her life.
She decides to go with him but at the airport she falls in with some Yugoslavian immigrants that run a bar called Zanzibar.
Attracted by their way of living she enters Zanzibar, she feels very well, she feels something different, she realizes that doesn't need all the things she had...
And this is the problem: since Mrs. Jordan is unable to understand that, that her family doesn't need her, that all her life was wasted, and although she feels alive in Zanzibar, she forgets that she doesn't belong to the world of the Yugoslavian immigrants: she is out of place.
Understanding that all your life was a nonsense, understanding that all your life has always been empty I suppose is not easy: so she kills the man who becomes her lover in Zanzibar and then kills all her family including the psychiatrist her husband hired !!!: the movie got some comic moments, but is not a joke in anyway.
Makavejev scoffs at family, materialism, capitalism..., he is telling you "forget the money, forget the clothes, just feel the heat of life..." Think of it.
Very good movie..
Very good movie..
I really don't like doing the whole, "Not many people will understand this," vein, but this movie really isn't for everybody.
A lot of this film is circuitous and self-reflexive, and everything breaks down so that any given meaning something may have eventually undermines itself later.
The acting is great but unnecessary because the characters just say what they're thinking/feeling/etc.
The story is of a bourgeois woman who falls in love with a man from a lower class and lives happily ever after...
Montenegro is a character only he's one of the most incidental and least important.
So by all means, believe my intentions are good when I say this film is not for everybody.--PolarisDiB.
Were it not for the wooden dialogs this could have been a better movie.
It is a little hard for the characters to come off as authentic when they sound as if they give dictation.
The humor was not bad, especially in scenes such as the group-photographs with the man with the knife sticking out of his forehead, but such scenes are few and far between in this movie.
The ending (no spoilers here) is too abrupt, as if the director wanted to end the film in the quickest way possible.
I could not identify with, or bring myself to like any of the characters, and that alone makes this a bad movie.
The one thing I would say for this endeavor is that the sex scenes are refreshingly original..
Anyone interested in how to fight society's anti-libido, control freak, exploitive mindset which Makavejev describes quite well in several of his works, may want to consider how humor, as he points out in interviews and with this film, succeeds in doing so.
Reading Listen Little Man and Character Analysis by Wilhelm Reich or Charles Konia's The Emotional Plague may open a heart or two to better appreciate Makavejev's subtle contrasts.
Marianne Faithful's ballad for "Lucy Jordan" found love hidden between the lines in this story's corners..
I guess with Sweet Movie Dusan Makavejev's bizarreness peaked and he decided to make something more straight forward.
It is still by no means a regular movie, but there's weird and then there's "weirdest".This one is like a feminist tract about a bored, rich housewife who leaves her snobbish husband and perfect kids to stay with some bohemian Serbs who run a debauched night club.She has a fling with a young man, and yes, that does mean they have sex on a pile of food.I think with his less bizarre, assaultively creative movies, Makavejev also became less interesting.