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Desire and kapital, as Mallarmé would say, "destiné à une tombe ou à un bonbon." Woman refracted, two dreams by Dusan Makavejev glued together with milk and blood and piss. Miss World 1984, "solid health and purposeful direction" sponsored by the Chastity Belt Foundation, Mademoiselle Canada (Carole Laure) wins it handily with her glowing hymen. Her prize is marriage to Mr. Dollars (John Vernon), which doesn't last past a honeymoon of rubbing alcohol and golden showers, into a valise she's stuffed for a tour of carnal shocks. A stuck moment with El Macho (Sami Frey) in the Eiffel Tower, in Otto Muehl's therapy commune a most gleeful recomposition of the dinner party from Browning's Freaks. Elsewhere, Anna Planeta (Anna Prucnal) sails down Amsterdam canals on a barge adorned with Karl Marx's granitic head and picks up a sailor from the Potemkin (Pierre Clémenti), "an authentic sexual proletarian!" Catatonic Candide and the Communist Candy Witch, in the helicopter over Niagara Falls and down with the corpses in the Katyn Forest, the giant tear for them all has a goldfish in it. "Aren't you from that revolution that failed?" Bodybuilders and schoolboys, the lingering bitter taste that leads to a vat of chocolate before a commercial camera. Beethoven's ode to shit, laughter before death as the granulated sugar grows sticky and red. From revue caricature to vérité gross-out to offhand transcendence, the freest vision from the freest auteur, opulent, sad, jolly, angry, magically disgusting, absolutely mad. Against the sinister call of control ("Let everything be known, and let everything be clean"), a beautiful plea for opposites united ("Let's be realistic, comrades, and demand the impossible"). Body bags like chrysalises in the ending, a literal resurrection (cf. W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism). With Jane Mallett, Roy Callender, and Don Arioli.
--- Fernando F. Croce |