[3][4] An international co-production of companies from France, Canada, and West Germany, the film follows two women: a Canadian beauty queen, who represents a modern commodity culture, and a captain aboard a ship laden with candy and sugar, who is a failed communist revolutionary.

The commune practices some liberating sessions, where a member, with the assistance of the others, goes through a (re)birth experience, cries, urinates and defecates like a baby, while the others are cleaning and pampering him.

The second narrative involves a woman, Anna Planeta, piloting a candy-filled boat in the canals of Amsterdam with a large papier-mâché head of Karl Marx on the prow.

However, the actress portraying the character, Carole Laure, left the production after becoming increasingly disgusted over the actions required for her performance; she decided to quit after shooting a scene in which she fondled a man's penis on-screen.

The film created a storm of controversy upon its release, with scenes of coprophilia, emetophilia, implied child molestation, and footage of real-life remains of the Polish Katyn Massacre victims.

[8] American philosopher Steven Shaviro commented that, in Sweet Movie, Makavejev went where no filmmaker had gone[9] but the film is "too intellectual to be ecstatic [and] too visceral to be theorizable", and that "certain questions [Sweet Movie] asks simply can't be answered", such as whether the practices seen in Otto Muehl's commune were genuinely liberating or forced by the commune's groupthink.