Dusan Makavejev' s star rose in the film world in the early Seventies when two of his masterful and controversial films, W.R. Mysteries of the Organism, 1971, and Sweet Movie, 1974, his fourth and fifth features, proclaimed him to the world as an iconoclast and outrageous social critic, from no less a forum than the Cannes International Film Festival. Throughout his career, Makavejev has been a firm believer in the theories of the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who taught that economic and political oppression are directly linked to sexual repression in a society. In each of his films, his exploration of that philosophy is infused with an audacious sense of humor and a down-and-dirty curiosity about human sexuality that leaves no foible or daydream unexplored. Seeming to hold nothing sacred, not even the teachings of his mentor, Makavejev often renders Reichian thought a goofy system of liberation achieved through horrifically hilarious acting out, even as he lampoons the moral constrictions and hypocrisies of the Western world with abandon. The Western world of the early Seventies, however, was perhaps unready for such liberation--exhibitors got themselves arrested for showing the Yugoslav director's work. Thus, irregardless of his two consecutive triumphs at Cannes, Makavejev entered a seven-year period without work.

Moving his axis from his native Yugoslavia, Makavejev returned to shake up the status quo with Montenegro in 1981. The film, continuing the director's sexually frank exploration of human nature, was made within boundaries defined by the film's Swedish producer, Bo Jonsson. These included the stipulation that it be a comedy, in English, have popular appeal and "measured" eroticism. The limits placed on Makavejev diminished neither his sharp eye nor his wit, and if anything, caused him to generate shock through shuddering and irreconcilable social contrasts even while the issue of sex, as opposed to sex itself, remained front and center, albeit in many disguises.

"The Ballad of Lucy Jordan," delivered in Marianne Faithfull's ragged and quavering voice, haunts the film, setting up the story of an empty life fueled by unrealized fantasies. But unlike the woman of the song, who is a dreamy victim of her aching deprivation, Makavejev's antiheroine Marilyn Jordan (Susan Anspach), the American wife of a Swedish businessman, comes across as a resourceful child in the body of a beautiful woman, willful, deceptively passive, and tragically, insanely self-centered. To the extent that Montenegro is an arch comedy about a dysfunctional family, which also includes Marilyn's preoccupied husband, a foxy grandpa, and two children old before their time, she is not alone in her strangeness, only considerably more lethal.

Makavejev divides Montenegro into two spheres: Marilyn's superficially wholesome, middle-class Stockholm; and the alien, smoky, beckoning Zanzi Bar, a ramshackle enclave of Yugoslav immigrants situated with elan on the wrong side of the tracks. An aborted adventure at the airport leads Marilyn to become a guest/hostage/interloper, it truly hardly matters, in a place she never knew existed. Makavejev introduces his countrymen with exuberance that springs from damning, endearing satire, from the wan young prostitute she meets in detention at customs, to Alex, the rakish owner of Zanzi Bar, and his blowsy ex-wife. Marilyn's so-called real life is subsumed for a short time into a violent, boisterous community that welcomes her without question.

In naming Montenegro after a mild-manner zoo keeper, one of the denizens of Zanzi Bar who had coincidentally made an appearance in Marilyn's other life, Makavejev reveals the metaphor that is central to the film. The world is made up of keepers and the kept; those who prey and those who are consumed. The wild, lusty Slavs who bray out their mating call to this ever-so-refined lady over glasses of homemade hooch may appear to be a threat of basest kind, but in the end it is she who turns on the poor sense-driven creatures for possessing the honesty of their appetites, making the man Montenegro her sacrificial lamb.
--Barbara Scharres

Cast

Susan Anspach (Marilyn Jordan)
Erland Josephson (Martin Jordan)
Marianna Jacobi (Cookie Jordan)
Jamie Marsh (Jimmy Jordan)
John Zacharias (Grandpa Bill)
Per Oscarsson (Dr. Pazardjian)
Marina Lindahl (Secretary)
Bora Todorovic (Alex Rossignol)
Lisbeth Zachrisson (Rita Rossignol)
Svetozar Cvetkovic (Montenegro)
Patricia Gelin (Tirke)
Nikola Janic (Mustapha)
Lasse Haberg (Customs Inspector)

Credits

Written and directed by: Dusan Makavejev
Producer: Bo Jonsson
Director of photography: Tomislav Pinter
Editor: Sylvia Ingemarsson
Art director: Radu Boruzescu
Sets: Eric L. Johnson
Music: Kornell Kovach
Costumes: Inger Pehrsson
Associate producers: George Zecevic & Christer Abrahamsen
Production supervisor: Bojana Marijan
Additional scenes and dialogues: Branko Vucicevic, Bojana Marijan, Arnie Gelbart, Bo Jonsson, and Donald Arthur

About the transfer

Criterion is proud to present Montenegro in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.66:1. This new digital transfer was created from the original 35mm interpositive and the 35mm magnetic audio tracks. The transfer was approved by director Dusan Makavejev. The trailer was transferred from a 35mm composite print.

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