One of the cinema's great enigmas, Dusan Makavejev, shot though the firmament of sixties and early seventies cinema like a flamboyant, brilliant comet. A product of the brief efflorescence in Yugoslavian film making, Makavejev made two astounding picture in Serbo-Croatian, W.R., the Mysteries of the Organism (197) and the incredibly radical Sweet Movie (1975). Makavejev's early films, made behind the Iron Curtain amaze by their mere existence -- it remains improbable that pictures so ideologically uncompromising (they are explorations of Wilhelm Reich's theories of sexuality) could ever have been made, let alone under conditions of tyranny in the Yugoslavian confederation. (Presumably, Makavejev's work was so outre that the censors had no idea what he meant and what he accomplished with these works). Sweet Movie, banned in many countries -- the film, which stars the real Miss Canada as a murderous, castrating figure-skater whose casually explicit sex scenes with a Red Army soldier are intercut with documentary images of corpses being disinterred from a mass grave (I think it's at Katyn, Poland) -- managed to deeply offend and disturb everyone notwithstanding their political views, Left, Right and Center. Makavejev ended up defecting to the West and made several much less demanding pictures with Hollywood performers, Montenegro (with Susan Anspach and Erland Josefson, 1981) and, then, 1985's The Coca-Cola Kid (starring Eric Roberts and Greta Scaachi). The Coca-Cola Kid was Makavejev's bid to achieve Hollywood credibility (somewhat on the model of Ivan Passer's excellent Cutter's Way and Milos Forman's Amadeus.). The Coca-Cola Kid is a respectable film and Makavejev directs some remarkable sequences, but as a whole the movie is fragmentary and doesn't really cohere -- it's charming but not entirely successful. And the script, based on several short stories by the Australian writer, Frank Moorhouse is too subtle to be readily appreciated by most casual viewers -- the film takes an anti-corporate stance toward American cultural imperialism, yet, also celebrates the vibrant rapacious aggression that characterizes US business. The viewer is stranded between despising the arrogant philistine boosterism of the hero and admiring his pluck, eclat, and tenacity. This problem is embodied in the musical sequences -- the film formulates a jingle-like theme to promote Coca-Cola to Australians: the lyric proclaims "Don't want to go where there's no Coca-Cola /Take life by the throat when you're drinking Coke?" and the music featuring a digeridoo drone and sizzling drums is so catchy and infectious that the tune could well be wildly successful in promoting the soft-drink; it's what the Germans call an "Ear-worm", you can't get it out of your head. And, yet, the movie is not an advertisement for Coca-Cola and, indeed, is highly skeptical about the invasion of American consumer products into the world outside of the USA. (In fact, like Sweet Movie, but for other reasons, it seems astonishing that Coca-Cola allowed the film to be made and, in fact, the picture begins with a series of disclaimers by which the Atlanta-based Coke compant disavow the picture in all respects -- although the movie is a veritable museum of trade-marked Coke-related props and memorabilia). The film's tone is interesting: the picture is ideologically opposed to American cultural imperialism, but it has a sneaky admiration for the products of American business. (The movie has a similar theme and ambience to Local Hero, the Scottish director Bill Forsyth's comedy about an American PR man from Houston marooned on a remote Scottish island. I would suspect that the pitch for The Coca-Cola Kid invoked the box office success of Forsyth's 1983 film.)
Frank Baker (Eric Roberts) plays a Coca-Cola troubleshooter dispatched to Sydney, Australia. Baker is an ex-Marine, faithful Christian, and naively committed to the mission of his company -- that is, to disseminate Coke products all around the globe. Baker learns that a village in a remote Blue Mountain valley shows no sales of Coke products. He ventures to that place where other Coke employees have mysteriously vanished. In the village called Anderson Valley, Baker discovers that there is an independent bottling company that controls the market in the region -- this is the business owned by T. J. McDowell. McDowell runs a Victorian era factory complete with giant flywheels and big spinning governors beside roaring fires and he makes his drinks from truckloads of crushed local fruit. McDowell attended the 1927 Rotary Convention in St. Louis and there wooed and won the Coca-Cola poster girl. However, the romance soured and she committed suicide, thus establishing a sort of primal love-hate relationship between McDowell's business and the mighty Coca-Cola company in Atlanta, Georgia. Baker is threatened by McDowell's thugs and, even, attacked. McDowell himself takes a couple rifle shots at the Coke man. But Baker perseveres and, in the end, the old man takes a liking to him. McDowell comes to Sydney with a cadre of singing girls to promote a strategic alliance between Coke and his company -- the jointly produced soft-drink would be called McCoke and, in fact, McDowell even hires a skywriter to emblazon that logo in the sky over the Sydney Opera House. But no alliance is possible and, in the end, McDowell blows up his ancient factory to avoid its acquisition by Coca-Cola -- it's unclear whether the old man dies in the conflagration. Complicating this situation is that the fact McDowell's beautiful daughter (whom he has not seen for seven years) is a working as a secretary in the Coke HQ at Sydney and, in fact, has been assigned work with Baker. This young woman, Terry, who looks like her mother, provides the film's love interest. She is smitten with the handsome, if strangely androgynous, Baker (Eric Roberts, who is Julia Roberts' older brother, was always too exotically pretty for his own good.) Baker seems to have homosexual leanings and there are several scenes in which he is ambiguously courted by gay men who are friends with Terry. (There's also a silly subplot involving a gay cabana boy at the hotel where Baker is staying. This man is sure that Baker is a CIA operative and also courts the handsome Coke executive -- at the end of the film, a flower and fruit basket full of American currency changes hands, presumably because the cabana boy, who is also some sort of secret agent, believes Baker is working for the US spy service.) The plot is vestigial and disorganized -- there are feints in various directions that go nowhere, presumably scraps of Moorhouse stories that figure in the narrative but aren't ever developed. (For instance, there's a bravura scene where a biplane buzzes and, then, almost wrecks Baker's jeep -- the plane is carrying a lady pilot, an old woman, and wounded wombat being transported to the vet; in fact, the plane is clearly a set up for a whole complicated subplot, possibly involving an affair between the lady pilot and Baker, that never develops and, in fact, receives only one further glance in the whole movie. In a neat little shot, twenty minutes later, a convoy of Coca-Cola trucks edges along circuitous mountain roads moving toward Anderson Valley while the wombat, with paw in a white splint, watches the procession.)
By and large, the movie seems to be manufactured, like its titular product, along the formulaic lines of a Hollywood romantic comedy. But there's an edge, maybe not noticeable, unless you have seen Makaveyev's earlier, more dangerous, pictures. Comedies tend to be brightly and schematically lit. Makaveyev, by contrast, uses shadowy Rembrandt-styled lighting, casting many scenes in a penumbral amber darkness. There's a peculiar homosexual ambience -- in one scene, Terry encourages her gay friends to dance with Baker and, then, seduce him. Baker ends up half-naked smeared with some white substance in which pale feathers are embedded; he wears a big floppy woman's hat with showy avian plumage. (These feathers rhyme with the climactic sex scene in which Terry, wearing a Santa Claus suit seemingly stuffed with eiderdown has sex with the Coca-Cola kid -- feathers literally fly and there's a gender-bending aspect to the jolly fat man with the white beard suddenly revealed to be a voluptuous young woman.) Most remarkably, the musical sequences have the kind of strange ecstatic abandon that we associate with David Lynch. In Anderson Valley, the local Rotary Club stages a Christmas party in which a man with peculiarly commanding gaze (his eyes bore through the screen) sings "Waltzing Matilda" while a half-dozen Santas dance and quaff Coke -- this scene has remained with me as a vivid memory for almost forty years and, indeed, the sequence is spectacular. Similarly, the women singing McDowell's jingle look possessed, a chorus of bacchantes. Sweet Movie was daunting for many reasons, not the least it's equation of sex with chocolate with shit with death. There's something similar at play in The Coca-Cola Kid -- ice plays an important part in the film (it's used to keep the Coke cold) and there's a lyric encomium to the material spoken by McDowell. To avoid her father, Terry hides in a freezer full of Coke and ice, a strange conflation of sex with frigidity and, when she emerges, shivering and covered in frost (somewhat like the feathers that will feature in the sex scene) the effect is very compelling and peculiar. The movie tours all things Australian and there's a indigenous digeridoo player (the "sound of Australia" Baker proclaims) and a camel shot like an alien being, half-concealed in shadow, a sort of quadruped serpent. The film begins with an opening shot that has a surreal edge -- visitors to Australia landing at Sydney find themselves being fumigated to keep them from transporting foreign viruses and parasites to the Island Continent. (Of course, Baker is the most insidious of all foreign pests, an American entrepreneur.) Generally, Makavayev seems to be interested in how American commerce creates fresh desires in people so as to be able to satisfy them. Ultimately, American consumer goods, as embodied in charismatic Coca-Cola with its extraordinarily attractive trade-mark and packaging, suggests a new kind of commercial erotics. But these themes, probably the ideas that drew the director to these materials are kept in the background and not rendered as offensive, but rather charming. An attack on American capitalism becomes, in effect, a rowdy advertisement for Coke.
(The film once contained an exuberant bathing sequence in which Terry takes a shower, I recall, with her six-year old daughter. The sequence gave the audience a gander at the sublimely beautiful Greta Scaachi in her full glory and was very memorable for that reason. But the sequence also had a strangely tender aspect in that it featured the nudity of the pre-pubescent girl as well. These images have vanished with only a single trace from the film as now available through Amazon Prime -- the frontal nudity is all gone and there remains only the briefest glimpse of mother and daughter seen from behind. Someone, apparently, construed the sequence as child pornography which it most assuredly was not --and the images have all been cut from the movie. The Internet confirms that Janson Media, the company who now owns this film, has excised the footage in version available on Amazon -- commentators argue that the shower scene was superfluous in any event. But this is untrue: the theme of mothers and daughters is integral to the movie -- Terry is estranged from her father probably because of her mother's suicide; therefore, showing Terry with her daughter in the shower scene coheres with one of the film's thematic points, that is, the relationship between parents and their children. The little girl is called "DMZ" in the movie because her mother and father are involved in a nasty divorce, but regard the little girl as a "demilitarized zone", presumably a reflection of the unhappy relationship between Terry's parents. However, even when the movie was brand-new, some viewers were uneasy with the shower scene. Makavayev's films exist, however, to make people nervous.)
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