Film Review: WR: Mysteries of the Organism (WR: Misterije organizma, 1971)

Censorship often reshapes art in unpredictable ways, mutilating some works while inadvertently immortalising others. In socialist Yugoslavia, where Tito’s regime balanced authoritarianism with a veneer of cultural openness, films that overstepped ideological boundaries were euphemistically “put in the bunker”—a bureaucratic purgatory of indefinite bans. Few films suffered this fate as spectacularly as WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), Serbian director Dušan Makavejev’s anarchic collage of psychoanalysis, politics, and eroticism. A defining work of the Yugoslav Black Wave—a movement known for its subversive, avant-garde critiques of socialism—WR became both a casualty of state repression and a symbol of artistic defiance. Yet, decades later, the film’s legacy remains contentious: a messy, provocative experiment that captivates as much for its historical notoriety as its bewildering creative choices.

Premiering at Cannes to critical acclaim, WR was swiftly banned in Yugoslavia following its Belgrade premiere. Authorities denounced it as “anti-communist” and “pornographic,” though its real transgression lay in satirising the regime’s hypocrisies. Makavejev, until then a celebrated figure, found himself effectively exiled, his career relegated to the international arthouse circuit. The ban marked the symbolic end of the Yugoslav Black Wave and, with it, the brief cultural thaw of the 1960s that had allowed filmmakers to critique socialism from within. Paradoxically, the censorship amplified WR’s mystique. By the 1980s, as Yugoslavia’s political fabric frayed, the film acquired underground cult status. Serbian intellectuals lobbied for its rehabilitation, culminating in a 1987 televised broadcast—a belated victory that underscored the shifting boundaries of free expression in a disintegrating state.

For many viewers, WR’s reputation as a censored masterpiece clashes with its chaotic execution. Makavejev, often framed as a martyr for free speech, delivers a film that is undeniably bold but artistically uneven. The director’s earlier work, particularly Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967), blended documentary and fiction to explore the interplay of sexuality and ideology with surgical precision. WR attempts a similar synthesis but veers into self-indulgence, sacrificing coherence for provocation. The film’s cult status owes less to its merits as a “misunderstood masterpiece” than to its role as a relic of countercultural resistance—a cinematic Molotov cocktail hurled at bureaucratic prudishness.

WR positions itself as a spiritual sequel to Love Affair, doubling down on Makavejev’s fixation with merging Marxist critique and sexual liberation. The catalyst for this escalation was Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), the renegade psychoanalyst whose theories bridged Freudian desire and communist revolution. Reich’s later obsession with “orgone energy”—a pseudoscientific life force he claimed to harness in “orgone accumulators”—made him a pariah in America, where he died imprisoned. By the 1960s, however, countercultural movements resurrected him as a prophet of sexual freedom. Makavejev, ever the provocateur, seizes on Reich’s contradictions: the visionary theorist reduced to a crank, his ideas distorted by both repression and fetishisation.

The film’s first third leans heavily into documentary, juxtaposing archival footage of Reich with interviews of his Maine neighbours—a banal parade of elderly locals bemused by his legacy. This segues into vignettes of 1970s New York’s sexual avant-garde: Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs sings “Killing for Peace” in military drag; Nancy Godfrey of the Plaster Casters immortalises a Screw magazine editor’s penis in plaster; Warhol acolyte Jackie Curtis muses on gender fluidity. These sequences, while capturing the era’s anarchic spirit, feel disjointed—less a critique of repression than a voyeuristic tour of “edgy” subcultures. Makavejev’s camera lingers on the sensational (nude therapy sessions, BDSM demonstrations) without probing their political resonance, reducing Reich’s theories to tabloid fodder.

The fictional narrative, set in Belgrade, follows Milena (Milena Dravić), a beautician evangelising Reichian sexual liberation. Her roommate Jagoda (Jagoda Kaloper) embodies this philosophy through hedonistic promiscuity, while Milena’s suitor Radmilović (Zoran Radmilović)—a neurotic Stalinist—denounces her as “red bourgeoisie,” echoing the insults hurled during 1968’s student protests. The plot lurches into surrealism with the arrival of Vladimir Ilyich (Ivica Vidović), a Soviet ice skater named after Lenin. Milena seduces him, hoping to convert him to her cause, but their coupling ends in grotesque farce: Ilyich decapitates her, unable to reconcile carnal desire with communist dogma. In a final absurdist twist, Milena’s severed head declares her enduring loyalty to communism.

This thread, though rich in symbolic potential, collapses under its own weight. Makavejev’s satire of ideological rigidity—embodied by Ilyich’s literal “mind-body split”—is undermined by slapstick pacing and tonal whiplash. The Belgrade scenes, interspersed with documentary detours, lack the focus of Love Affair’s taut narrative, devolving into a series of provocations rather than a cohesive thesis.

Makavejev’s attempts at political irony fare no better. In one jarring sequence, clips from The Vow (1946)—a Stalinist propaganda film—are intercut with footage of asylum patients. The juxtaposition aims to equate ideological dogma with mental illness, but the metaphor lands with a thud. Rather than illuminating the psychic toll of authoritarianism, the editing feels glib, reducing complex critiques to facile equivalences. Similarly, scenes of New York’s underground—while historically fascinating—resemble exploitative “Mondo” films, their inclusion seeming arbitrary rather than incisive.

Comparisons to Love Affair only deepen WR’s deficiencies. The earlier film used its hybrid style to dissect the collision of personal desire and socialist morality, weaving a murder mystery into its sociosexual critique. WR, by contrast, abandons narrative discipline for scattershot experimentation. Where Love Affair balanced irony with empathy, WR succumbs to cynicism, its characters reduced to ideological caricatures. Makavejev’s signature interplay of humour and horror remains, but without the precision that once made it potent.

WR: Mysteries of the Organism is a fascinating cultural artifact—a prism through which to view the tensions of 1970s Yugoslavia and the West’s sexual revolutions. Yet as a film, it is less a triumph than a cautionary tale. Its censored status and Makavejev’s exile have inflated its reputation, obscuring its artistic shortcomings. The director’s ambition—to fuse Reichian theory, Marxist critique, and avant-garde aesthetics—is admirable, but the result is a cacophony of ideas in search of a framework.

Today, WR appeals mainly to completists of Eastern European cinema or scholars parsing the Yugoslav Black Wave’s demise. Its historical significance is undeniable, but its virtues remain stubbornly academic. For all its radical posturing, the film’s greatest mystery is how so much audacity yielded so little insight.

RATING: 5/10 (++)

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