In this film, Dušan Makavejev presents sex as the greatest of all revolutionary acts, in a radical manner typical of the 1960s/70s.
Image collages, documentary sequences and archive footage from the period since the conflict between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union tell of a series of subplots. These range from the story of the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to the story of Milena, a young feminist who finds her sexuality in a brief affair with a Russian ice skater.
Wilhelm Reich’s theories of sexual liberation serve the Yugoslav director to make a parallel with fascism, in all its forms and origins, the fetishism, the personality cult, the obscurantism. Makevejev makes a film that is indeed liberating, alternating between documentary reporting and cinematographic truth in the style of Warhol, poetic lyricism and political fantasy, psychodrama and eroticism.
Federico Schembri