Sweet Movie (Dusan Makavejev, 1974)

Anna Prucnal in Sweet Movie

Miss Monde 1984/Miss Canada: Carole Laure
Potemkin Sailor: Pierre Clémenti
Capt. Anna Planeta: Anna Prucnal
El Macho: Sami Frey
Mrs. Abplanalpe: Jane Mallett
Jeremiah Muscle: Roy Callender
Mr. Kapital: John Vernon
Mama Communa: Marpessa Dawn

Director: Dusan Makavejev
Screenplay: France Gallagher, Dusan Makavejev, Martin Malina
Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme
Production design: Jocelyn Joly
Film editing: Yann Dedet
Music: Manos Hatzidakis

In the 1933 decision that lifted the ban in the United States on James Joyce's Ulysses, Judge John M. Woolsey dismissed the charges of obscenity, though he found that "in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic." I've never found anything to be "emetic" in Ulysses, certainly not on the level of some of the more queasy moments in Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie, which exploits every orifice known to be possessed by human beings, especially in the orgiastic scenes featuring Otto Muehl's commune. As for obscenity, that lies in the eye of the beholder. To my mind, Sweet Movie dallies on the brink of it in the scene in which Anna Prucnal's Captain Anna, scantily clad to say the least, makes what appear to be sexual come-ons to a group of boys aboard her boat called Survival. At moments like this I snap out of the trance of make-believe into which art lures us, and into a realization that the boys in the scene are pre-pubescent actors. There's a layer of child sexual abuse in staging such a scene that I can't quite rise above. Beyond that, however, Sweet Movie does precisely what Makavejev wants it to: It surprises, startles, shocks, overturning most of our expectations of what a movie can and/or should show us. It's valuable for that reason alone. Whether it illuminates or provokes thought in its even-handed assault on both capitalism and communism is another question. It has begun to feel dated, as many avant-garde satires tend to do. But it's also done with a great deal of verve and chutzpah, which never really grow old.     

Pigsty (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969)

Pier Paolo Pasolini's Pigsty is too much like what people think of when they hear the phrase "art house movie," especially when they have in mind films of the late 1960s. It's enigmatic and disjointed, and has a tendency to treat images as if they were ideas -- significant ideas. There are two narratives at work in the film: One features Pierre Clémenti as some kind of feral human wandering a volcanic landscape in which he finds a butterfly and a snake and eats both, then dons the helmet and musket he finds beside a skeleton. It's some unspecified pre-modern era -- the helmet and the garb of the soldiers and priests he meets later make think 17th century. He kills and eats another man he meets, then begins to gather a group of fellow cannibals. The other story takes place in Germany in 1967 and centers on Julian Klotz (Jean-Pierre Léaud), the son of a wealthy ex-Nazi (Alberto Lionello) who styles his hair and mustache like his late Führer and is pursuing a merger with a Herr Herdhitze (Ugo Tognazzi), who is a rejuvenated Heinrich Himmler, having undergone extensive plastic surgery. Julian, meanwhile, is an aimless youth who resists the urgings of his fiancée, Ida (Anne Wiazemsky) to join in leftist protest movements and to have sex with her. He'd rather spend time with the pigs in a nearby sty. The efforts at satire in the modern section are as heavy-handed as they sound in this summary, especially since Pasolini has chosen to have much of the exposition delivered by the actors in the flat-footed style of a 19th-century melodrama. There are some acting standouts, however, in both sections, especially Léaud, who seems to be having more fun than his role allows; Clémenti and Pasolini regular Franco Citti throw themselves into their feral roles, and Tognazzi is suavely menacing in his. If the whole thing is meant as a satire on dog-eat-dog (or man-eat-man or pig-eat-man) capitalism, it is sometimes too oblique and sometimes too blatant. Pasolini is a challenging, original filmmaker as always, but this one doesn't transcend the often inchoate artistic fervor of the '60s avant garde.  

The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)

Of all the hyphenated Jeans, Jean-Louis Trintignant seems to me the most interesting. He doesn't have the lawless sex appeal of Jean-Paul Belmondo, and he didn't grow up on screen in Truffaut films like Jean-Pierre Léaud, but his career has been marked by exceptional performances of characters under great internal pressure. From the young husband cuckolded by Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) and the mousy law student in whom Vittorio Gassman tries to instill some joie de vivre in Il Sorpasso (Dino Risi, 1962), through the dogged but eventually frustrated investigator in Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969) and the Catholic intellectual who spends a chaste night with a beautiful woman in My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, 1969), to the guilt-ridden retired judge in Three Colors: Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994) and the duty-bound caregiver to an aged wife in Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012), Trintignant has compiled more than 60 years of great performances. His most popular film, A Man and a Woman (Claude Lelouch, 1966), is probably his least characteristic role: a romantic lead as a race-car driver, opposite Anouk Aimée. His role in The Conformist, one of his best performances, is more typical: the severely repressed Fascist spy, Marcello Clerici, who is sent to assassinate his old anti-Fascist professor (Enzo Tarascio). Marcello's desire to be "normal" is rooted in his consciousness of having been born to wealth but to parents who have abused it to the point of decadence, with the result that he becomes a Fascist and marries a beautiful but vulgar bourgeoise (Stefania Sandrelli). Bertolucci's screenplay places a heavier emphasis on Marcello's repression of homosexual desire than does its source, a novel by Alberto Moravia. In both novel and film, the young Marcello is nearly raped by the chauffeur, Lino (Pierre Clémenti), whom Marcello shoots and then flees. But in the film, Lino survives to be discovered by Marcello years later on the streets the night of Mussolini's fall. Marcello, whose conformity does an about-face, sics the mob on Lino by pointing him out as a Fascist, and in the last scene we see him in the company of a young male prostitute. This equating of gayness with corruption is offensive and trite, but very much of its era. Even the sumptuous production -- cinematography by Vittorio Storaro, design by Ferdinando Scarfiotti, music by Georges Delerue -- doesn't overwhelm the presence of Trintignant's intensely repressed Marcello, with his stiff, abrupt movements and his tightly controlled stance and walk. If The Conformist is a great film, much of its greatness comes from Trintignant's performance.