2. Sweet Movie (1974)
Welcome to the wild surreal world of Yugoslav director Dusan Makavejev and his masterpiece-of-a-kind - Sweet Movie. It is one of the weirdest film you will ever set eyes upon. Miss Canada wins a beauty contest on the basis of her perfect hymen. The prize is marriage to a billionaire. When they go to consummate the marriage, the billionaire has a gold painted penis and Miss Canada starts screaming. After a failed attempt to drown her, the billionaire gives her to his bodyguard who puts her in a suitcase and mails her to Paris. In the Eiffel Tower she falls in instant lust with a Latino singer. After his performance the pair have sex against a pillar but a group of nuns pass by and they are victim to penis captivus. After being freed from this misfortune, Miss Canada is adopted into a community of performance artists led by the infamous Otto Muehl. We last see her doing an advert for a chocolate bar, covered in liquid chocolate. Anna Planeta rides a barge with the head of Karl Marx on it. Inside is a lot of sugar and confectionary goods. She picks up a sailor called Potemkin and they begin an ecstatic sexual relationship although she warns him that if he stays with her, he will die. She eventually kills him in a vat of sugar. She also brings on board the barge a number of adolescent boys and in the film's most contentious scenes, appears to seduce them. She is eventually reprimanded by the police. A surreal, frenetic exploration of sex and communism, Sweet Movie was met with outrage when it was first released. It is essentially a montage movie with one surreal event unfurling on the screen after another. The film is notorious for graphic, unsimulated coprophagy, urination, emetophilia and pictures of a mass grave in World War Two. With the involvement of agent provocateur par excellence Otto Muehl, the film was always gong to controversial and the very perverse antics on screen may alienate a lot of viewers. The use of music in the film is very surreal - "Is there life on the earth? Is there life after birth?" - and it is totally appropriate. It may not be a 'True Surrealist' movie, but it follows in Buñuel's footsteps and can be called truly avant garde. As a side note, a lot of people b*tch about the antics of Otto Muehl and Company, but forget that the film draws attention to a dreadful war massacre that the Soviets refused to acknowledge and which is ultimately more distressing and horrifying than watching someone take a dump. It's all about priorities.