Montenegro

The caged ape behind the opening credits might be Rheinhold's, on the soundtrack Marianne Faithfull describes other monkeyshines to come: "She could clean the house for hours or rearrange the flowers / Or run naked through the shady street screaming all the way." Thus Dusan Makavejev's diary of a mad housewife, a gallant joke about the screwball Yank (Susan Anspach) in a Scandinavian household. Placid domestic stability is rejected, the heroine gobbles up the family's supply of fried schnitzel and, turned down by her sleepy hubby (Erland Josephson), blithely sets fire to the boudoir. The "brain expert" (Per Oscarsson) is brought in for a diagnosis, but what she truly yearns for are fewer befuddled patriarch and more chaos. A mix-up at the airport illustrates the film's subtitle (the hausfrau's string of baubles versus the immigrant girl's porker in a blanket) and sends her to the merry anarchy of The Zanzi Bar, a hangout for Yugoslav proles where cheating at cards gets you a knife in the forehead. The boozy scrabbler (Bora Todorović) guides her through the maelstrom of mattress-smashing humping, shovel duels and raunchy communal singalongs, the hunky zoo worker (Svetozar Cvetković) helps her shed her fur coat and embrace the visceral. "They'll never believe this at the Women's Club!" An onstage pas de deux between a Balkan wallflower (Patricia Gélin) and a toy tank-powered dildo and Oscarsson's Carl Jung-meets-Edward Everett Horton turn are but a couple of the deviltries in Makavejev's libidinous circus, which certainly sets the stage for the slapstick barnburners of Emir Kusturica. The calm punchline is the screen's most sweet-natured slaughter of familial order. With Lisbeth Zachrisson, Marianne Jacobi, Jamie Marsh, John Zacharias, and Lasse Åberg.