The Coca-Cola Kid (Dusan Makavejev, 1985)

I doubt that many unprompted viewers could identify The Coca-Cola Kid as the work of the director of Sweet Movie, especially as they’re only separated by one intervening film (Montenegro). The earlier picture is outrageous, shocking and compelling, taking its celebration of freedom to unsettling extremes, constantly asking us what price we’re willing to pay for it, and apologizing for nothing; in contrast, The Coca-Cola Kid timidly opens with several screens’ worth of disclaimer regarding its very title. The movie sounds in summary like a satire – an American whizzkid “fixer” comes to Australia, his focus entirely on monetization, only to become sidetracked by local oddities and temptations – but the focus is obscure, and the sainted brand gets off pretty lightly. Where Sweet Movie revels in sexuality, the fixer spends most of the movie trying to avoid it; his eventual change of heart in this regard seems under-motivated, a product of movie calculation rather than ideological triumph. The film focuses, strangely, on something that would seem tangential at best: the fixer’s fixation on bringing Coke to the one region of the country from which it's excluded, a local magnate monopolizing the market with his own brews, but the resolution of this too is grim and murky, certainly not allowing much in the way of symbolic victory. Perhaps then the main point of the film lies in this very sense of defeatism, in positioning such global brands and infrastructures as essentially impervious to meaningful mockery, or even to normal narrative forces and influences: the closing caption tells us that the following week in Japan the next world war began, which might appear only to acknowledge that the whole movie has been an exercise in looking in the wrong place, for the wrong thing. In that sense it draws nicely on Australia’s established peculiarity – as a place that looks exactly like the West, while gradually revealing itself as being stubbornly and unyieldingly Other.