1. Sweet Movie (1974)
Utterly demented and perverted art house filth from Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavajev which mixes astute observations about the state of communism with lots of sex. The film follows two women - Miss Canada and Anna Planeta. Miss Canada wins the title of Miss World due to her virgin status and thus becomes the wife of a milk business tycoon. She freaks out at the sight of his penis - which has been painted gold. The family give her over to their bodyguard and he puts Miss Canada in a bag and sends her to France. At the Eiffel Tower she falls in love at first sight with a Latin singer who reciprocates her love. They have sex against a pillar but a gaggle of nuns comes past and El Macho and Miss Canada become locked together in penis captivas. After they are are separated, Miss Canada becomes adopted by a weird artist community led by the infamous Otto Muehl - possibly the most perverted man in the world. The commune sit down to dinner and then get up to all of the shenanigans that are iconic of Otto Muehl and the Vienna Aktionists. I won't go into detail as it is all very rude but it involves multiple bodily functions. Miss Canada is last seen wallowing naked in liquid chocolate for an advert. Anna Planeta is another character who inspires sexual goings on. She is on a boat filled with sweets and sugar and a paper mâché head of Karl Marx. She invites Potemkin - a young man onto her boat and they indulge in some rather public sex on the barge. She keeps telling Potemkin to leave, but he stays until she stabs him to death as he lies in a vat of sugar. Anna, in some extremely contentious scenes, invites some young boys aboard the boat and seemingly seduces them and kills them. The film ends with her arrest. Sweet Movie is one of my favourite films. Probably number two after La femme publique. If you want to be challenged - politically, sexually, morally, aesthetically challenged - Sweet Movie is the film for you. It is just so surreal and confrontational in its content, there is nothing like it anywhere in cinema - except Makavejev's other famous art house smut extravaganza - WR Mysteries of the Organism. One one level you could write Sweet Movie off as deeply prurient smut. The scene where Anna Planeta appears to perform a provocative striptease in front of some young boys is hard to justify and has many viewers crying "child porn!". There is also the whole segment with Otto Muehl and his Vienna Aktionist friends. I can appreciate it as a piece of performance art because I am acquainted with the work of Muehl and I know what his objectives were. People who are unfamiliar with Muehl and his agenda are likely to be thoroughly sickened by what they see on screen, and I wouldn't blame them. Smut or art? A mixture of both I think. More learned people than me would be able to dissect the film's politics and its commentary on the state of capitalism and communism. But I do know that Makavajev was trying to assault our senses and liberate our psyches in a most avant garde way. Beneath the bodily functions lies a thoroughly revolutionary movie which is as relevant and as fun today as it was back in the days of Eastern bloc communism.