W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (Serbian: W.R. - Misterije organizma, W.R. - Мистерије организма) is a 1971 film by Serbian director Dušan Makavejev (born 1932) that explores the relationship between communist politics and sexuality, as well as exploring the life and work of Austrian-American psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957).
The film intercuts documentary footage with, predominantly, a narrative about a Yugoslav woman who seduces a Soviet ice skater. Despite different settings, characters and time periods, the different elements produce a single story of human sexuality and revolution through a montage effect.
The song that Vladimir sings in Russian after Milena's murder at the end of the movie is called "François Villon's Prayer" by Bulat Okudzhava.
Milena violates her proletariat convictions (and rejects the sexual advances of a worker) by pursuing the Joseph Stalin-like ice skater who represents both class oppression and corruption from the West into communist beliefs. This concept is at the central themes of the film: the degradation of pure communism, the Western-like repression of free sexuality, and the ignored applicability of Reich's theories of human sexuality to personal freedom also in economic and political realms.
In classes given at New York University Department of Cinema Studies in 1975, Makavejev alluded to his frustration that idealistic communism had become corrupted in practice in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union because it had abandoned free love and open sexuality as a way of freeing economic and political oppression. These ideas are central to this film as the Soviet ice skater can not cope with his huge and healthy sexual hunger and converts that energy into a murderous rage.
A couple of scenes in the film are re-stagings of scenes from Sergei Eisenstein films, to allude to a moment of more pure (truthful) film making in the Soviet Union.