What a fitting title. (I've been getting a lot of those lately.) In the end, I'm not sure it's about anything--that title or the movie attached to it. The title is referenced in the film's tagline: "Some women are born to be sweet trash." And guess what, that tagline has absolutely nothing to do with the movie. Women are the opposite of sweet trash in Sweet Trash. They are usually the only good people in the entire movie. I assume then that the filmmakers were being self-aware. But really, in the end, it's the style, not the substance.
A mobster named Dan shows a beautiful redhead a good time in the sack. She extols his virtues as a lover, and then he shoots her, explaining that "the new computer" determined she knew too much, and talked too much. Then, one of the other members of his mob, Mr. Rizo, has sex with a woman who comes to his mansion. This somehow reveals to him she has information on a certain man "the computer" has them looking for. They need the services of a longshoreman of a particular personality, and the one they've found is Michael Joseph Donovan, who may as well mark down on his resume that he works a second full-time position as an alcoholic. Mike is a pretty jovial guy, but he's also got a skeezy side to him--he spends too much time staring at women, and his pits are perpetually sweaty. Presently he owes $4,000 to the mob, the same mob Dan and Rizo belong to, and he has a chance to win it at a card game. He just needs another two Gs to break out, but at the critical moment he blows it and sets himself back that extra 2,000 as well. The only thing left for him to do is to make a run for it...and his quest for freedom will take him to places and feelings he never could have expected. Meanwhile, the computer is hunting him.
Another (?) movie which is similar to Gretta. I never thought I'd say that, but I never thought I'd see a movie that tries so hard to seem like it's not deliberate. There are so many weird things going on in this movie that it becomes inscrutable at times. It is simultaneously a sexploitation movie, a surrealist art film, a mobster thriller, and a sci-fi speculation exercise. It asks too many questions at once and slathers everything over with increasingly-bizarre sex scenes, as if the real interest is meant to be all the boobers that are on screen. And yet...and yet...oh, hell, I'll just tell you some of the shit that goes down here.
So there are just some little nods here and there--that's the first layer. These are incidents that don't really lead to anything. When there's talk of breaking Mike's fingers, for instance, there happens to be a topless stripper nearby, and the mobster sets the hand he's set to break on her boob: "One last feel," he muses quietly. Then, later on, Mike is speaking to a possibly-illusory Puerto Rican woman when he suddenly imagines that his hands are full of bloody strips of flesh. These things will then form their little strings of pearls that make the movie's private architecture twisted and uncanny. Mr. Rizo keeps having sex with ladies and it keeps getting darker and darker, until we're actually freaking out when two girls are closing in on him with fake vampire teeth, chanting over and over again, "Here we come to suck the blood from your neck." The human mind doesn't function well in the surrealosphere. And it keeps getting bigger and badder.
The movie makes its transition from sleazy exploitation to pure drunken horror both slowly and starkly. There's a moment where Mike is wandering around wasted in an abandoned part of town, and the happy but overly-nostalgic music that keeps haunting him throughout the film suddenly turns into something right out of Jay Chattaway's soundtrack for Maniac. And this leads into the scene where the Puerto Rican lady and Mike walk back through Mike's timeline, visiting his earliest memories, including when he was molested by a neighborhood woman when he was ten. This quick insight back into the source of Mike's alcoholism (presumably, at least) is portrayed entirely for black comedy, like a lot of the film, actually. Mike laughs hysterically as he recounts what happened, and when the woman tries to say it wasn't his fault, he says, "Oh, I'd sinned, mama. But I had such an innocent face that they never knew it."
This is pretty some tough shit to watch, but there's enough counter-negative tone to keep things going. And all those contrasting tones never overlap each other in a way that makes it a painful sit. I don't really know what the themes of this movie are. The angle where the mobsters are helpless to obey their mostly-offscreen computer may be a comment on authority, but it may also be to help explain the corners the plot cuts on its road to surrealism (i.e. there's no reason for the characters to act this way besides the writers making them, and the computer plotline is a cover for that). The whole movie may also be a remark on alcoholism, and indeed this is probably the most realistic depiction of alcoholism I've seen based on what I've heard from former alcoholics--it can be the angry or sorrowful ruts but there's also the boisterous and embarrassing joyousness of drunkenness. Alcoholism can be quite the happy thing even if it's also agony, and that happiness is usually why the drinker stays an alcoholic. And then there is delirium tremens.
This movie is basically Delirium Tremens: The Movie. For all the depression inherent in that, that's a movie I've always wanted to see. I like being taken on a rough ride in my trash, without having to dip into the roughie flicks that the '70s would go on to produce. Sweet Trash may not have art, or even direction, but it has heart, and I can dig that. There's a lot of imagery that will haunt you long after, which coming from me is, once again, nothing short of a recommendation.
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