Review of Sweet Movie (1974) by Reece L — 23 Sep 2015

Painfully dull and predicated upon a simple premise worthy of a first-year film major's angrily self-indulgent diary entry, Sweet Movie doesn't seem to understand the fact that you do not earn profundity through empty transgressive nonsense. It is not brave to simply revel in the depths of human depravity if you're not going to attempt to make a larger connection to society as a whole (and no, obvious, limp attempts at satire aimed at society's forms of governmental ideology do not fulfill this requirement).

Contrary to that boring school of thought rooted in the idea that a film is a success if it illicits any kind of response from an audience, anti-authoritarianism doesn't succeed on its own. If all you're going to present is repetitive, tedious, dull, puerile gags that get their point across in the first five minutes, you've done nothing except create a sophomoric venture into empty contrarianism. It is possible to deal with these themes effectively (Hanake's The Piano Teacher, for example, is an exceptional deconstruction of the oppressive nature of societal repression in a way this so desperately wants to be), but Makavejev doesn't seem to want to dig deep enough to hit this kind of ground.

In the midst of all its gleeful taunting, I nearly fell asleep, only perking up to shake my head at the ignorance motivating the lazy and misguided scene involving an adult/child sexual interaction (other points of regressive ignorance can be found in its treatment of black people and its degradation of the female form). While I'm sure 19 year olds working their way through their intro-to-film classes will find this riveting, it left me entirely unimpressed, and the fact that it explicitly dares the audience to find it repulsive near the end so it can label you an oppressive slave to normative social mores is more insulting than anything else.