Montenegro

Director: DuĊĦan Makavejev
Year Released: 1981
Rating: 2.0

Repressed housewife Susan Anspach, tired of her 'impotent' bourgeois husband (Erland Josephson) gets wrapped up in a group of Proletariats Who Wanna Have Fun and run a night club (the Zanzi Bar) with sleazy sexual stage acts (dildos on toy tanks, for example). This was the proverbial beginning of the end for Makavejev - his first effort after the audacious and, to this day, almost unfathomable Sweet Movie and the point in which he started to abandon his collage-film aesthetic for a more mainstream approach. Anspach is fine as the jittery mother, but the mixture of steamy kitchens with pigs being cooked, sweaty Serbian workers and woozy surrealism works better in the hands of Kusturica, who had to have seen this film (in fact, Montenegro plays like an early template for Underground).