Sweet Movie 4K 1974

The very title of “Sweet Movie” tells the viewer that it’s going to be very sweet—and if you don’t suspect that the entire film will be assaulting your brain with all sorts of figurative excretions of modern civilization over the past hundred years—which, in fact, is characteristic of our civilization as a whole throughout history—then you might fall for the trick. It’s a different story if the viewer already knows that the entire film will force them to confront themselves—and, like me, they simply want to see once again just how much of a mess we all are and how low we’ve sunk with all our talk of societal progress. Well, if you throw Baudrillard into the mix, everything will fall into place in your heart and mind, and you won’t be able to let the film go after watching it. You won’t, I’m telling you. Has everyone heard me? Is anyone here?

The director takes two stories—two women, essentially—two… um… political and social anthems of the last century—capitalism and socialism—and peppers the stories with hints of varying complexity, some not so obvious; you have to interpret them in different ways, come up with possibilities, and that’s interesting. it ruthlessly and provocatively exposes everything we live in, are constantly immersed in, and—as terrible as it is—take for granted, all presented in tones that are schizophrenic on a visual and psychological level. In other words, by playing with the mind of the average person, it replaces what is normal for a person with visually repulsive and frightening images. In principle, this is the film’s main stylistic feature, if not the only one. Certainly the primary one.

There are no stories about women as such—no experiences, no feelings, no relationships—here, the “object” as such does not exist at all in any of the characters. All the objects in the film are essences, fragments that make up this or that phenomenon, vice, or yet another timeless delusion of an eternally sick society, so vividly and explosively reflected in the film. Yet each of the heroines, precisely as objects of reality, is highly distinctive. One is a model who won a beauty contest featuring intimate body parts; the second is a free-thinking proletarian woman with creative inclinations; and, as a continuation of this, a pervert craving sex. Both go with the flow, but just as capitalism and socialism lead to the same outcome, so too will the heroines, once caught in the same vortex, be reduced to a single sludge. All in all, perhaps a self-assured but rather obvious conclusion.

True, the film’s central theme is slightly different—one I’d rather not discuss and, as noted earlier, is best simply remembered and kept silent. After all, everything that’s happening now has come about, in part, at the cost of great sacrifices. And so, there’s a sort of moral to the story: “But what was all this for???”…