Sweet Movie. 1974. France/Canada/West Germany. Written and directed by Dušan Makavejev. With Carole Laure, Pierre Clémenti, Anna Prucnal. 35mm. In English, Polish, French, Spanish, Italian; English subtitles. Courtesy the Cinémathèque française. 98 min.
One of Clémenti’s first roles after his release from prison was in Serbian provocateur Dušan Makavejev’s still transgressive Sweet Movie. Utterly absurd and shamelessly obscene, Makavejev’s maligned fifth feature succeeded in its mission to shock bourgeois society and arthouse orthodoxy with its orgiastic manifesto on sex and politics. Clémenti plays a Potemkin sailor who sojourns on the Karl Marx riverboat, where sugary delights and revolutionary ideology are on offer but sex and violence also lurk around the corner. With parallel plots spanning a beauty pageant, a commune, and a banquet whose delirious excesses caused the film to be banned in several countries, Sweet Movie was a radical challenge to the “sweet talk” of mass media, advertising, and political rhetoric of its time. This French archival print retains Clémenti’s original dialogue (later dubbed into English).