Montenegro (1981)

Masterful Movie

Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

To say this movie is weird, is an understatement. But that's what makes this great character study of a film, intriguing, with just the right amount of sex and nudity, complimented by an intriguing weirdness and stylishness. You gotta give it that. Though it's that early pier scene, that stays in my mind, the great Anspach who just commands the screen, with each scene she's in, plays an insanely bored rich little wife, who husband's neglect has worsened to the point of making her completely tipped over. Her frustration is something we really sympathize, if painfully witness, where she goes to some scary lengths, two illustrate her upset. Getting in a bit of strife at the airport, where she's separated from hubby, and ending up with some "not your typical but exciting immigrants", she happily embarks on a rejuvenating adventure with some pretty saucy scenes, some you can well tell, have been toned down. The bizarre yet tragic ending based on fact, is the high point of this whole film, which if far from perfect, but one movie experience, you must indulge once, if even just for the great Anspach. Indulge

Pearls?: Nursery rhymes (sound track lyric) are templates for future behaviors. Pigs?: Read this review to decide for yourself if hogs look better with ear-rings and lipstick. Montenegro: I have yet to read Rex Stout's prewar novel Over My Dead Body and the novel which followed when Tito came on stage, The Black Mountain. Anyone interested in how to fight society's anti-libido, control freak, exploitive mindset which Makavejev describes quite well in several of his works, may want to consider how humor, as he points out in interviews and with this film, succeeds in doing so. Reading Listen Little Man and Character Analysis by Wilhelm Reich or Charles Konia's The Emotional Plague may open a heart or two to better appreciate Makavejev's subtle contrasts. Nobel Prize receiver, Doris Lessing's 1971 Briefing for a Descent into Hell shares a similar Balkan story about making choices shortly before punk rock lyrics hit the scene to remind us of what we look like from our mirrors' lighter, more honest side. Marianne Faithful's ballad for "Lucy Jordan" found love hidden between the lines in this story's corners.

I really don't like doing the whole, "Not many people will understand this," vein, but this movie really isn't for everybody. I personally got so much from it from my first viewing, and yet I got the strange feeling that no one else in the theatre I was in really quite "got it", so to speak. A lot of them laughed heartily, but they seemed to laugh at the apparent "randomness" of it, but none of it was random at all. This is a very precise and firmly crafted piece of postmodern art.First of all, the climax is somewhat in the beginning when she says "I hate being in this movie!" and the very beginning is really the last shot. A lot of situations that incited laughter only did so after the punchline had already been given moments beforehand. A lot of this film is circuitous and self-reflexive, and everything breaks down so that any given meaning something may have eventually undermines itself later. The thing that's excellent about it is how precise and organized it is at breaking everything down into structureless structure. The acting is great but unnecessary because the characters just say what they're thinking/feeling/etc. The story is of a bourgeois woman who falls in love with a man from a lower class and lives happily ever after... only not really. Montenegro is a character only he's one of the most incidental and least important. The children are the caretakers. The adults are the adolescents. And so on...This film gets a lot of laughs from its irony, but mostly it's a very tense film to try to watch, and I would have MUCH preferred watching it in private so that I wouldn't feel the tension mounting in the auditorium as people literally strained to try to make sense of it. So by all means, believe my intentions are good when I say this film is not for everybody.--PolarisDiB

Susan Anspach is beautiful and delirious (must've been the acting lessons from Jack Nicholson), Marianne Faithfull singing "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" was a stroke of brilliance, and the scene of the husband prancing around the Danish moderne bedroom with his psychiatrist and his wife, wearing nothing but matching bathrobes juxtaposed to the gypsy basting the roast with the beer he's drinking is one of the most memorable scenes.I'd own this but there are children in the house. It is raunchy.