Reviews

Another reviewer here wrote that this film is like Pasolini's Salo as a comedy - that's best description of it I can think of.

Sweet Movie is definitely flawed (as is the brilliant Salo): some political/social messages are a bit heavy handed and it's not half as subtle, or subtly crafted, as Makavejev's earlier films. But maybe that's the point. You make a movie with Viennese Actionists, you're not going to get a very subtle film.

Makavejev is bizarrely forgotten or dismissed by critics and audiences alike these days (just look at the supercilious reviews for this film and WR in a certain London-based film guide!). Personally, I think he is as great a director as Bunuel or Godard. In fact, the Miss Canada storyline in Sweet Movie is very Bunuelian, reminiscent of Viridiana. Some of it is perhaps a bit too slapstick but it must be said her journey to Paris in a suitcase is a stunningly surreal image. Makavejev's depiction of her journey from socially-acceptable (intact) 'purity', innocently collaborative with the people who try to destroy her, to isolation and madness and finally to a model gyrating then (seemingly) drowning in chocolate is pretty shocking.

Makavejev seems to be interested in how people, and primarily their bodies (including corpses) and, er, their sexual being are used and abused by all of us, personally and within an institutional context. Often this stuff is sugar-coated for our 'protection'. The Actionists show this by breaking practically every taboo of polite society. But, like the portrayal of Reich in WR, Sweet Movie does not portray the Actionists' bodily 'freedom' un-ironically. Miss Canada's reaction to their ecstatic antics is finally one of disgust and alienation (which seems to be true of Carole Laure's own opinion of the film!).

The other storyline in this film, in which a revolutionary sea captain with sugar and other things in her hold falls in love with a Kronstadt sailor continues Makavejev's themes of what constitutes 'revolution' and 'freedom', what are its dangers, and what are the truths and lies present in that word. The scene in which the captain does a striptease is uncomfortable viewing to say the least. This seems to be another comment on what should or should not be taboo about the way we use our bodies and those of others. Hanzel and Gretel allusions about whom to trust are also pretty evident. The captain feels compelled to ensnare adults and children to preserve a vision of Soviet revolution in a weird Jeffrey Dahmer way. She is a vision of revolution: hopeful, free, angry loving ... and sometimes murderous.

Anyway, Sweet Movie is not Makavejev's best and seems to have blighted his career, but it's still one of the most challenging and provocative films you're likely to see. All I can say is: Long Live Makavejev. Any producers out there: give him some money to make another film!

I've only seen half this film on late-night TV so I can't be sure if it's really good or not. The bit I did see was charming. McEnery is fabulous as the Conan-Doyle hero, Cardinale is as lovely as ever and Eli Wallach hams beautifully.

There's lots of running about deserty parts of Spain and amusing asides to the camera by Gerard, including the perfect way to get your boots off.

There are also very weirdly filmed (and plain weird) sequences that put this film far above other silly 1960s "romp films" (is that a genre?). The best example is a stunning slow-mo bit where a bandit with his head popping up in the middle of table is killed William Tell fashion by his preposterously debonair chief.

I'd love to see the rest but it hasn't got a DVD release (I don't think it even had a VHS release) and is very rarely screened on telly. Like at lot of Euro-productions, it's uneven, often badly dubbed and was probably panned at the time, with most people involved having forgotten about it (or trying to forget about it). Perhaps it's a great "undiscovered" comedy film. It's at least worthy of a bit more attention.

And what happened to Peter McEnery? He was great in this and as Mr Sloane. The results on this site show he's been condemned to TV mini-series for 25 years.

If you've ever been harassed on the Underground by a Christian who says, "Jesus is the answer. What's the question?", then perhaps you should thank God if you've never met a Lacanian. Slavoj Zizek, the most evangelical of Lacanians, would surely exchange the word "Jesus" in that statement for "Lacan/Hegel".

Zizek's star burns brightly at the moment, no doubt because we generally view films and pop culture purely as entertainment for our consumption. So it seems impressive when someone - anyone - comes along and says, "Hang on, films may say something about ourselves."

The ideas Zizek expounds in this film are "true" purely because he says so. For example, Zizek explains that three Marx Bros are the ego, superego and id (God knows what happened to Zeppo, or Gummo … perhaps they're the sinthome...or is that movies themselves?). This is simply what they are. In Zizek's output, culture is not there to be investigated but merely to be held as an example of his ideology. People may object that he certainly has something to say - but how different is what he says from the Christian attributing everything to God's will?

What's wrong with taking examples, from films or anywhere, to illustrate theory? Well, nothing at all. As Zizek seems to believe, they may even serve as a proof. However, it is merely cant and propaganda when these examples are isolated from their context. Without context, you can say and prove anything you want. For Zizek, Lacan is the answer – so he goes and makes an example of it. Everything but everything resembles the teachings of the Master and culture is there to bear this out, to serve this ideology. For instance, Zizek's exemplar of the fantasy position of the voyeur is taken from a scene in Vertigo when Jimmy Stewart spies on Kim Novak in a flower shop. But, in the context of the film, this is not a voyeur's fantasy position at all. Stewart has been deliberately led there by Novak. This presentation of examples isolated from their context continues throughout Zizek's two hour and a half cinematic sermon.

His analysis of the "baby wants to f---" scene in Blue Velvet is laughable. Touching lightly on what he appears to consider to be the horrific (to the masculine) truth of "feminine jouissance", Zizek says that Isabella Rossilini's character not only demands her degradation but is, unconsciously, in charge of the situation. This is an example of her "jouissance". Well ... possibly. But - sorry to be prosaic - where is the evidence for this? In the film, she partially undergoes her humiliations because Hopper has kidnapped her son. Zizek may object that she also evidently enjoys rough sex with Kyle MacLachalan. But this may be due to any number of things. Isn't that the point of so-called feminine "jouissance"? According to Lacan, feminine jouissance, unlike phallic jouissance, cannot be articulated, it is beyond the phallic capture and castration of language. If this is right, then no example can be made of it. It also means that the entire concept is non-sensical and entirely mystical. It can only be designated by dogmatists such as Zizek: "There's feminine jouissance for you! Why is this feminine jouissance? Because I say so."

What example can really be garnered from these films? Only Zizek's psychology. Why does he keep inserting himself into his favourite films, even to the point that, when in a boat on Botega Bay, he says he wants to f--- Rod Steiger too? Is this not the wish-fulfilment of someone who spends his life critiquing films? As the saying goes, Freud would have a field day with The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema - but with Zizek himself, nobody else.

Zizek's theory that films show us how we desire may be right on the face of it, but these films cannot be strict universal examples of psychoanalytical laws. This film illustrates how Zizek desires and only extremely vaguely - as to be almost useless - how the rest of us desire. For, as any psychoanalyst knows, how we desire and what we desire cannot be fully separated - and cannot be easily universalised, if at all. Zizek's love of making everything an example of Lacan's Answer bears this out: how do we desire? like this, this is how I do it. Problem is, in Zizek's desire, everything and everyone else is rationalised into his desire. But Zizek is a Leninist and they certainly don't like letting the "subject" speak for itself.

The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema is a summation Zizek's love of dogma and is entirely unphilosophical even if it remains very political (what dogma isn't?). Zizek has never questioned exactly what his motives might be when embarking on an analysis, what he is trying to discover, because the terms of his exploration, and therefore his ethics in doing so, are never put into question.

Zizek is extremely prolific but all his books and this film say the same thing. He's a kind of Henry Ford of cultural theory: mass-production and any colour as long as it's black. He is perfect for today's highly consumerist society: supposedly critical while giving people the same c-ap over and over and pretending that it is something different. This is popular because people largely prefer readymade answers to their problems - which capitalism always claims to provide - rather than investigating things with any serious consideration at all. Which is kind of like being brain dead. For me, Zizek's third Matrix pill is a suicide capsule.

PS: I loved Zizek's solemn remark - presented as a revelation about cinema and humanity - that music in films can greatly affect people's sympathies. Did this only occur to Zizek after he watched Jaws?

I saw A Cock & Bull Story at the London Film Festival last year. The film should do well: it's been very heavily publicised, has well-known comedy actors in it, and - when I saw it - the packed house loved it. The film is enjoyable primarily because of Steve Coogan's and Rob Brydon's seemingly ad-libbed comedy, but as a version of - or even tribute to - Sterne's Tristram Shandy it fails miserably. The film barely grasps the character of this (anti-) novel at all. I blame director Michael Winterbottom for this. The book's tangential narratives are too briefly handled in the first half to leave the viewer with any real sense of Tristram's gargantuan project. The film's first half races along at breakneck pace, presumably to suggest a mad-cap hilarious confusion to Tristram's narrative - but all I was left with was the feeling that the director was terrified Joe Public might be bored by the boring old eighteenth century. The all-too-jaunty pace suggests a lack of faith in the novel's comedy and a lack of faith in the viewer's intelligence. Tristram Shandy is a very funny book and the humour is evident without such forced jauntiness. Sterne is a notably playful and generous novelist, he loves his readers and never displays a lack of faith in them. The film's lack of faith, in itself as well as in its audience, is also evident in its rendering of the famous black page - discussed by director, writer and actors as to whether it is possible to put the trope of a black page into a film at all. Suddenly the screen goes black! ... but the soundtrack remains and the discussion continues, for five seconds before the audience is reassuringly given back the visuals again. If Winterbottom had Sterne's resolve and experimental touch he would have kept the screen black without sound for, say, fifteen seconds. Making your audience uncomfortable doesn't mean you don't respect them! And what of the actual discussion of the viability of putting the black page in the film? A more courageous experimental film/director wouldn't have flinched from doing it, let alone chat about it in an oh-so funny way. Can you imagine Godard having such qualms? The other big problem with this film is its film-within-a-film conceit. It's all about the impossibility of getting a film made and of faithfully rendering Tristram Shandy, which itself is about the impossibility of faithfully rendering the complexity of life - geddit? If you don't, Stephen Fry is on hand to explain this to you in the manner of a patient uncle at the end of the film. Not only is this a wretched simplification of the book's theme about art and artifice but this theme is itself just one amongst many themes in the book. Tristram Shandy handles these themes with humour and experimental elan but A Cock & Bull Story sticks rigidly to its one theme, wearily restating it again and again (rather than going any deeper) in a way that is more listless than joyfully experimental. What follows on screen is a sort of comedy soap-opera of the prurience that is wrapped up with celebrity (something that has nothing to do with the novel). Some of this soap-opera is indeed very funny, but not as funny as, say, Marion & Geoff or Alan Partridge. If Winterbottom had tried to stick to the novel - a truly courageous and difficult undertaking - instead of heading into the usual fundament-gazing about media and celebrity that masquerades as analysis and filmic experimentation then A Cock & Bull Story would have been wonderful. As it is, the film is rather like what Steve Coogan, put on the spot by Tony Wilson, says about the novel: 'I suppose it's kind of ... a postmodern masterpiece before, er, there was any modern to be post about.' A nice joke, but one that resounds hollow when applied to the film itself. In other words, the film is generally a load of Bull: read the book instead! Corporal Trim