Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 20
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
134/365: The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991) (Amazon Prime)
Cinema as transcendance, if you let it happen. The rhapsodic alchemy of this Polish/French hit has everything to do with the worshipful attention to dewy star Irene Jacob, to the the world-through-a-teardrop cinematography of Slawomir Idziak, and to the fundamentally enigmatic tale co-written with Krzysztof Piesiewicz: two women, one a choir soprano in Poland, the other a music teacher in France, both played by Jacob, coexist simultaneously but are unaware of each other. Criss-crossings, unbalanced awarenesses, sudden deaths, global ghostliness, neverending questions… Or, a metaphor for life’s sense of absent connectedness? One of the last great old-school art films, by a gone-too-soon master.
135/365: Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch, 1939) (Vudu)
A screwball-comedy bliss-out, this classic paean for Parisian mad love-&-fun has hedonistic American expat Melvyn Douglas pitch woo to steely, humorless Soviet comrade Greta Garbo, who’s in town on a matter of state business (goofy Russian agents distracted by the Gallic pleasure principle). Of course, Garbo, in her first comedy, is masterful as the comically grim maiden in a gray suit, barely disguising a warm heart and yearning for love that we can always see beating beneath the Marxist-Leninist ideology. A little champagne, a little Paris skyline, and she opens like a lily (figuratively speaking, at least; this is 1939). It doesn’t hurt that Lubitsch had the subtlety and timing of a Hollywood Mozart, and the screenplay, mostly by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, is one of the wittiest and gentlest of the entire Golden Age.
136/365: Weiner (John Kriegman & Elyse Steinberg, 2016) (Hulu)
One of the most amazing and revealing documentaries about politics ever made, this head-slapper tracks the hapless progress of Anthony Weiner has he runs for New York mayor in 2013, after his 2011 resignation from Congress once nude sexts he’d sent (to women other than his long-sufering wife, Hillary Clinton advisor Huma Abedin) went public. This is his comeback campaign, and in mid-film it’s kneecapped by more sexts and emails, precipitating a collapse — as we watch, up close — of both his political career and his marriage. No fiction film could’ve come up with this film’s cauldron of self-destructive drama, or invented a compulsive character as revealing of the modern political landscape.
137/365: The Cat and the Canary (Paul Leni, 1927) (Amazon Prime)
The seminal trapped-in-a-haunted-house thriller, a late grate silent adapted from a famous play that formed the template for a hundred films going forward (and many episodes of Scooby-Doo). Except there’s no haunting, just a scare-your-pants-off scheme to seize an inheritance, but the primal, essential vibe of the ancient mansion clotted with candle-lit secrets, hidden passageways, creeping menaces, infinite hallways, unopened rooms, and unknowable skullduggery remains an axiom of movieness, and it’s still hypnotic.
138/365: In the Battlefields (Danielle Arbid, 2004) (Amazon Prime)
Set during the civil war in Lebanon, a detailed coming-of-age drama that’s fairly drenched in war-bludgeoned irony, as a 12-year-old girl living in Beirut (Marianne Feghali) has more difficulty dealing with her self-cannibalizing, extended Christian-Arab family — you could call their dynamics Middle-Eastern Gothic — than with the daily bombings of 1983. Her ersatz salvation is her aunt’s rebellious 18-year-old maid (Rawia Elchab), but only just so — the movie keeps the war in the background (as most wars are for tortured teenagers), but still paints a compelling portrait of childhood bled dry by a self-concerning and inept adult world.
139/365: Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992) (Netflix)
Eastwood’s masterfully menopausal study in western violence, a kind of post-anti-Western, in which ambivalent emotional roots are located within the genre’s mythology, and every story is made up of other stories, none of which have neat moral conclusions. Eastwood refigures the meaning of his entire Western legacy, going back more than 30 years to Rawhide, by way of a screenplay by David Webb Peoples that Eastwood admitted he’d bought years earlier and had to “age into.” Melancholy, mature, thick with genuine character business — it’s everything Westerns should be and never were, and might be the last time a film unarguably deserved its Best Picture Oscar.
140/365: Pather Panchali / Aparajito / World of Apu (Satyajit Ray, 1955–59) (Vudu)
The films that put Indian films on the global map, Ray’s neo-realist trilogy traces the life of a poor Bengali boy, from pre-teen youth to grown man, confronting poverty, tradition, responsibility, and the world at large outside of his village. Each is an acclaimed masterpieces, each guides gently but indelibly through a world culture the West rarely sees (even in Bollywood films), and each is a beloved testament to movies’ empathic power.
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Smashcut 365 is a weekly recommendation of films for budding cinephiles — seven films a week, one a day, no repeats — ranging from classic masterpieces to new and provocative indies and imports, intended to kickstart your cinephilic habit.
Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19
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