Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 48
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
331/365: The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977) (Criterion Channel)
A luminary in a Khrushchev-thaw Soviet generation of filmmakers that included Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexei German, Kira Muratova, Sergei Paradjanov and Otar Iosseliani, Shepitko was something like the gorgeous Carole Lombard to husband Elem Klimov’s Clark Gable, a romantic profile made even more glam by their thorny run-ins with the censorship bureau and, most of all, by Shepitko’s tragic 1979 death in a car wreck, amidst shooting her fifth feature. This is her fourth, an in-your-face Eastern Front war saga that begins with breathtaking confidence in the Byelorussian forests, among Communist partisans running in the deep snow from Nazis and scrounging desperately for food. Subsumed by icy whiteness, two soldiers on recon confront the wilderness, trade fire with distant patrols, and land, wounded and starving, in a farmhouse full of children, just in time for a Nazi patrol to show up. Thereafter, it’s the most ethically hysterical POW drama ever made, in a frontier dungeon that becomes a hothouse of betrayal. The partisans’ odyssey in the wilderness is picked over in interrogation, and measured against patriotism, collaborationism, partisanship, self-preservation and even spiritual sanctity. Shepitko was a maestro at poetic visuals, as in the Vampyr-like close-up of the wounded partisan as the Nazi sled takes him through the countryside, the camera gently veering up to the sky and back again. The film can be emphatic (especially in its acting), but there’s no escaping the final gallows scene, when a diminutive teenage we barely know helps out by placing the noose around her own neck.
332/365: Ajami (Scander Copti & Yaron Shani, 2009) (Vudu, YouTube)
Shot rough and ready on the shoulder with a spot-on non-pro cast and often without a script, this largely Palestinian production by Israeli firsttimers Copti and Shani, this riveting Israeli crime saga evokes both Traffic and City of God but avoids their hyperbolism, findingts hot spot in the titular Arab ghetto of Jaffa, one of those wretched urban zones where everything — racial hatred, exploitative commerce, crime, jihad — intersects. The story is a web, shuddering with reverb after a café owner guns down a Bedouin extortionist (an event we only see eventually, in flashback), and the cycle of retribution begins, roping in over a dozen characters from Muslim, Jew and Christian families. But the narrative isn’t just a single lamentable blood feud, but several, also involving gang vendettas, ODs, forbidden romances, illegal Arab workers, drug sales that turn out not to be drug sales at all, and plenty of innocents caught in the crossfire. Copti and Shani play their narrative-shuffle cards perfectly, and their elaborate tumble of catastrophes never feels contrived. On the contrary, the exposition we need to fathom the social politics on hand — as in, a council of Bedouin elders elaborately calculates the monetary cost of a killing, letting the guilty party live but giving him days to come up with the sum, instituting more mayhem — is seamlessly integrated. Nominated for a Foreign Film Oscar.
333/365: L’Inhumaine (Marcel L’Herbier, 1924) (Amazon Prime)
The infamous, long-sought mega-splash of au courant cinematic Futurism, and one of silent cinema’s most notorious follies, this remarkable oddball revolves around a spectacularly unlikely uber-femme (matronly opera chanteuse Georgette Leblanc, ex-muse to Maurice Maeterlinck), who drives men mad, spurs suicides, and inspires secret resurrection plots (using proto-television and “magical science”), all of it happening on absurd meta-modern cut-out sets designed by Fernand Leger and Claude Autant-Lara. L’Herbier himself thought the story asinine, all the better to construct a cardboard universe teetering on the brink of l’amour fou, technological revolution, and frenzied subjectivity. No other film best exemplifies how what was eventually labeled French Impressionist cinema straddled the canyon between narrative film and the experimental — at times the film looks like a fractured Man Ray concoction extrapolated out into a dream epic. At others, it’s an Erte design given preposterous life. Today, it looks like the starting pistol for the skylarking tradition taken up today by Wes Anderson (and, in several ways, chaperoned in between by Jack Smith, Larry Jordan and the Kuchar brothers), and glows with the beauty of the erstwhile avant-garde.
334/365: The Exploding Girl (Bradley Rust Gray, 2009) (Hulu)
Nothing at all explodes in this daringly modest, palm-sized American indie, flirting with the mumblecore aesthetic but in the end emerging with its own quiet personality. The sophomore director’s calculations pay off — we watch his college-age heroine (Zoe Kazan) so patiently that when the romantic moment she pines for arrives, silently and in a grand, intimate two-minute pan, it’s an epiphany. It helps that our expectations have been brought so definitively to earth — Kazan’s Ivy comes home to Manhattan for spring break, flush with a new boyfriend at school. Her Art Garfunkel-y buddy Al (Mark Rendall) shows up on her doorstep, they dawdle, chat, sleep, and as Al regales Ivy with news of his budding romantic interests, she gets summarily (but very politely) dumped by her boyfriend, via cell phone. The arc is still climbing when we realize Al is all Ivy really wants. Grey’s mise-en-scene is lovely and restrained, often shooting his actors across the street or park and letting them interact with the crowds, and landing one of the most beautiful New York-rooftop dusk shots ever recorded. But it’s the two leads that matter most — the movie trundles along like an unnarrated Rohmer short for a while before we realize that Kazan (granddaughter of Elia) has hooked us, as we’d all be hooked in real life by this squirrel-cheeked, slightly zaftig sweetheart with big hazel eyes. It’s a New Wave axiom, one that’s forgotten too often: if you have a cat-eyed girl with sunlight in her hair, you need little else. Sit still and pay attention.
335/365: The Call of Cthulhu (Andrew Leman, 2005) (Amazon Prime)
Something can separate the merely moviemad from the medium’s gadzooks film geeks: a “new silent” film, scrupulously faithful to H.P. Lovecraft’s seminal Cthulhu tale (first published in 1928), running only 47 minutes but packing enough storytelling and energetic incident to fill out a mini-series. Produced by something called the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, this adorably antiqued micro-indie cuts every corner and freely employs obvious miniatures to tell the tale-within-a-tale-within-a-tale, from the Providence streets all the way to the mid-Pacific night (a blanket, scant nods toward a ship set, digitized perspective), the unmapped atoll covered with enigmatic ruins (cardboard, mostly), and the stop-motion appearance of the Old God himself. It’s a lark but an obsessive one, and it actually manages to be creepy, in a cheap, unstable, kids-pretending-in-the-woods kind of way. It is innocent, and that alone makes it special.
336/365: The Garden of Earthly Delights (Lech Majewski, 2004) (Amazon Prime)
Majewski is a restless artiste-experimenter, often given to Modernist pretension, but not here — his ninth film is a deeply felt tragedy, a home-video mock doc portrait of Claudine (Claudine Spiteri), a British art lecturer currently focused on Bosch and the eponymous triptych. She’s adorably three-dimensional, earnest and coy and sexy and generous in turn, and we fall in love with her just as Chris (Chris Nightingale), the filmmaker, does. Jump ahead (and, back and forth — the film proceeds like a rifling through an unorganized box of home videos) to Venice, where the two lovers find an apartment, work on a video-lecture about Bosch, and engage in all manner of exploratory and often ridiculous lovers’ games (many derived from interpretive questions arising from the Bosch painting, which she is always trying to figure out), until it we slowly realize that genuine engine of the scenario: Claudine has throat cancer, and is dying. Spiteri is unforgettable, but the larger thrill comes from the seamless dovetailing of high art and human transience — she is always searching for meaningful answers in the radicalism of Bosch, just as he believes without saying so that his ceaseless image-making of her will somehow prevent her impending doom, making it a world-class love story.
337/365: Roma (Alfonso Cuaron, 2018) (Netflix)
Hype can squash a movie if it’s delicate and modest and sensitive enough, and so it may have been with Cuaron’s magical award-winner, a quiet, watchful film about a Mexican maid that critics sang to the heavens about, raising expectations beyond the possible for a lot of filmgoers’ tastes. Don’t be detoured: the hosannas are big but the film is breath-holdingly modest, precious, generous and, most vitally, meant for grown-ups with active empathy muscles and tensile attention spans. It is also, in its own pensive way, one of the great films based on the filmmaker’s childhood memories. Expect only a little, and it’ll lay you out.
Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47
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