Others who have commented on 'Montenegro' seem to miss the film's point. Yes, it is a black comedy; no, it's not nihilistic. The characters do not behave in incomprehensible ways - they behave in ways alien to our Western acculturation & our snobby "everybody must do nice-nice to each other" civility. 'Montenegro' takes effete, overbaked, hypersophisticated, irrelevant Western sensibilities & turns them smack on their pointed little heads.
American Marliyn Jordan (Susan Anspach in a tour de force performance) lives in Sweden with her Swedish husband. Marilyn is not, as other commentators have misapprehended, a bored, psychotic housewife - she's a woman who, in her overbaked Western milieu of mind-blenching affluence, oversensitive men & women, diplomatic euphemism, & arcane, costly, "necessary", psychobabble (brilliantly depicted, & sent up, in the analysis scene), has lost touch with all that's primal, urgent, & vital in herself.
Already whacked out from living in her gilded, padded, safe-till-she's-numbed life, Jordan impulsively hooks up with a completely primal, totally up front & no bones about it, caveman & club bunch of howling, lusty Montenegrans. Once she's with them things happen very differently from the way they failed to happen in her previous ersatz saccharine-junkie life.
Jordan is in for keeps with people who play for keeps. Lust, blood, sex, ooze, vendettas, vengeance - all the primal, classical, down-deep-in-human-nature emotions & their instantaneous acting-out - are how things are for Jordan now in Montenegro. The suddenness, violence, & clarity of emotion & action repulses us because we're so used to warning labels on everything from cigarette lighters & child safety seats, & from self-esteem minuets in schools to language prohibitions in our workplaces. All that's out the window in 'Montenegro' with Marilyn Jordan fast losing her melancholia & madness, & rushing headlong into shameless, unbridled lust, man-baiting, cat-fighting, & knock-down (with that caveman club!) & drag out sex.
Watching 'Montenegro' we Westerners are intrigued, repelled, fascinated, revolted - but we can't turn away from the fluids & furze, the basal & nasal sensation, the genitals-out-in-the-winds-of-Fate abandon, & the cathartic, orgasmic, lethal, & vital primordial reckoning that is 'Montenegro' exploding on our retinae, in our ears, on our skin, in our nostrils, & in our wide-open mouths.
One wonders if Camille Paglia has seen 'Montenegro' because one expects she'd love it, because this film delves into things primal that Paglia's betes noires - radical gender feminist ideologues - reject and label "patriarchal violence against women" & "not women's way of knowing". Let's just say that 'Montenegro' isn't likely to be high on Gloria Steinem's, Patricia Ireland's, or Susan Sontag's list of all-time favorite films. That alone tells how worthy this film is of wide open embrace & enjoyment: 'Montenegro' doesn't cave or cop to salon intellectualism, pop psychology, Botox beauty, animal rights activist solipsism, or moral relativism. This is the real deal: down to brass tacks humanity stripped of culture & deodorant & Sani-Pure flush toilets & sparkling bidets & layers of insulation from the Real.
'Montenegro' isn't Greek Tragedy, it's not Shakespearian artistry, & it sure isn't Frank Capra or Spike Lee - it's pure primal, take no prisoners, heads-on-lances, bareass naked human nature turning back the clock & stripping away the veneer of Western propriety. It's an enrapturing, refreshing, uncensored look at the way we humans were...and still are. 'Monetenegro' gives us a pungent whiff of how we smell without deodorant, look without makeup, feel without politically correct "civilized" Thought Police cues, touch with unwashed hands, & taste blood-rare meat without first checking to be sure our side of veggies is certified to be "organic", washed, or attractively presented. Nobody calls for a cop in Montenegro, watches Oprah, or cares less what Dr. Phil advises; nobody hails a waiter without ducking for the dagger that will come hurtling his way; & nobody bats an eyelash without understanding up front that it means, "Come hither: Now!" In 'Montenegro' nobody trifles with food & wine & sex & death because they're the stuff of everyday life - life on the edge, life in the Now, into which Marliyn Jordan, body & soul, hurls herself.
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