The film for which director Dusan Makavejev is best known. It's similar to his later Sweet Movie, which I watched last week, in that it's made up of a bunch of disparate parts edited together. The most prominent thread is a documentary about sexual psychiatrist and (pseudo-)scientist Wilhelm Reich, a refugee from Nazi Germany who fled to the United States, where he was ironically persecuted and imprisoned when the government became suspicious of his work. A second thread is fictional, set in Eastern Europe, and is about a sexually liberated woman (Milena Dravic) promoting sexual freedom in Communistic language. There are other smaller threads about Andy Warhol's transsexual protégé Jackie Curtis, a hippie with a gun who runs around New York City, a woman who makes dildos and probably a couple of other ones I'm not remembering. The film covers some interesting areas, but it's too loose and not interested enough in any of these things to engage in them. The separate bits began to fall apart, for me at least. Sweet Movie was kind of a mess, but it was a well-structured masterpiece in comparison to WR. I liked Sweet Movie a whole lot more.

WR:Mysteries of the Organism is a kaleidoscope of images and sounds, one long montage of bizarreness that is very hard to pin down or come close to understanding.

The movie begins as a documentary about Wilhelm Reich, the man whose theories about sex and the body landed him in jail and have been more or less forgotten, despite tapping into the counterculture of the time with figures like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs adherents of his theories about life energy.

The movie soon turns weirder, with sex artists making moulds of erect penises, a man running around with a toy rifle he masturbates for the camera, a random transvestite, and confronting footage of modern day psychotherapists who have co-opted aspects of Reich's teaching, ie. that the boundary of touch should be broken in therapy and that patients should undress down to their underwear. They are also shown screaming and shouting and at one point, taking hold of the therapist's hands and apparently sucking on them like a baby would their mother's nipple.

Perhaps weirdest of all - and this is how you know you're in a Dusan Makavejev movie - is the part of all this that is not documentary but was scripted and filmed for the movie. A tale of a female sexual revolutionary who lives with a mostly naked woman, the revolutionary dons a helmet and gives an address to the working classmen who live in her block of flats, a rousing ode to the power of sexuality. Later she meets a Soviet ice skater and things take a turn for the worse, as well as the bizarre, when she turns up dead and her decapitated head speaks on the coroner's metal dish.

It is not possible to make sense of a movie like "Mysteries of the Organism" while you watch it. It's like great poetry: you just let the images wash over you. Afterwards, writing a review like this, it seems pretty clear that the Reich part of the movie sets the stage for us to see sex as something precious and not the be interfered with by the tools of government. The latter part of the movie shows how this has gone wrong, with the movie-within-a-movie, and the frequent interjections of Stalin, shock therapy, and madhouses.

That the movie was banned in Communist Yugoslavia after it was made and its creator exiled is the real ending of this work.

The plot concentrates on Wilhelm Reich's controversial vital energy… Reich believes that unless a mysterious universal phenomenon called "orgone energy" is discharged naturally through sexual union, obsessions and compulsions will erupt...

The film is a collection of these sorts of neuroses, done with exceptional skill and comic action, set in modern-day Yugoslavia… The main character is Milena Dravic, who shouts from her heavily populated apartment: "Politics is for those whose orgasm is incomplete!" Complimenting the idealistic Milena are two female sexologists who are obsessed with the physical nature of human relations...

The film is a blast at repression of any kind—political or moral—and a poem to uninhibited sexual intercourse... Repression sickens and enslaves, whereas nature's physical pleasure sets the human spirit free…

There is an abundance of vivacious sexual encounters, much nudity, and constant immersing into other social taboos, but the film's coup de grâce is a natural mixing of erotica, humor, and politics...