Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 52
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming — One Year Anniversary!
359/365: Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) (YouTube, Amazon Prime, Vudu)
An animated documentary? This eye-scorching Israeli film skirts categories, and comes at you like a lysergic drug targeting your optic nerves, from the opening, as we zoom along at ground level with a pack of ravenous, fanged dogs running through the Tel Aviv streets under a stormy yellow sky, drawn and animated with high-contrast, nightmarish surreality. The dogs are part of a dream — the dream of an Israeli soldier who, years earlier amid the invasion of Lebanon, couldn’t shoot people so he was given the thankless task of shooting watch dogs, all 26 of which hunt him in his dreams. The soldier is just one compatriot sought out by Folman, who 25 years after serving in the army and being present for the ’82 Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees cannot remember a thing about it. So he interviewed friends from that time, and friends of friends, to find out what happened and, by extension, why he’s suppressed the memories. The restless tableaux — entire landscapes scorched by bombings, a downed pilot’s sea-lost hallucination of a giant naked woman, an international airport wrecked and abandoned after an aerial attack, a lingering stream of blood running from the back door of an armored vehicle — could hardly have been rendered so energetically, or indeed rendered at all, in a modestly budgeted live-action film. Politically pungent and visually astonishing.
360/365: Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996) (Mubi/Amazon)
So French you can smell the ashtrays: Assayas’ best film, a run-like-hell, semi-improvised farce detailing a doomed contemporary Parisian remake of Louis Feuillade’s legendary serial Les Vampires — a French-culture staple — by an aged and unstable New Wave giant (Jean-Pierre Leaud, doing Godard). This sputtering, neurotic hulk decides to make the film silent and in black-&-white, like the original, which hardly bodes well, but then he casts bewildered Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung as the arch-villainess after only seeing her in the cheesy HK actioner The Heroic Trio. (“That’s not me, that’s a stuntperson,” she quietly objects when he shows her the tape.) It’s a crazy matrix of inside movie geek baseball; when a crew-character, working on remaking Feuillade’s early silent film, is seen watching a clip of the Group Medvedkine’s radical, post-May-‘68 documentary portrait Classe de Lutte (1969) on TV, in which the unionist heroine plays a swatch a Chris Marker Cinetracts short on a Moviola, you’ve already stumbled down a Gallic moviehead’s rabbit hole. But Cheung, playing her non-French-speaking self wandering through a labyrinth of crew squabbles, logistical impossibilities, gay crushes and nervous breakdowns, is an enchantress, and the film balances precariously on her smiles and modest equilibrium. Her most triumphant scene, and the film’s creepy, mysterious heart, has Cheung attempting to connect with her role as the night-lurker Vep by going on a midnight prowl across the Paris rooftops all alone, stalking through the shadows and down hotel corridors in skintight black leather and heels, eavesdropping on strangers and even thieving their jewelry.
361/365: That Thing You Do! (Tom Hanks, 1996) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
A sweet, giddy, unpretentious lovesong to one-hit wonders in an age when show business was still an impromptu, hands-on party practically anyone could join, Hank’s directorial debut pulses with gentle respect for its characters and a genuine ardor for pop music and the middle class lives it touches. Every time you think there’ll be a love triangle, a clash of personality or a contrived tragedy, the film skips over it gracefully and simply attends to the music, the times and the beguiling characters’ delirious good time living out the American Dream. “You’re way better than anything,” says one of start-up pop group The One-ders’ first fans, and damn if she’s not close to right: the Erie, PA quartet’s first and only hit single (written by Adam Schlesinger) is so adroit and propulsive you don’t mind hearing it 18 times by film’s end. The film mostly follows the footsteps of Tom Everett Scott’s insouciant drummer, who joins the band (which includes Jonathan Schaech as the self-absorbed songwriter/frontman, and Steve Zahn as a wisecracking guitarist) with dreams of jazz greatness. It’s a small film, aiming modestly low and hitting every bull’s-eye, and the performances are engaging, especially Zahn as the group’s inspired wisenheimer and Liv Tyler as Schaech’s selfless girlfriend. At the same time, it cuts a slice of the ’60s no one seems to remember anymore — the still-cleancut, soda-pop Middle American-ness just beginning to be raised on rock radio.
362/365: The Immortal Story (Orson Welles, 1968) (Criterion Channel, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Vudu)
Cinema’s greatest arch-expressionist, Welles loved movies for their simulacra and prevarication — not knowing something for certain, even as you were looking at it (or its reflection, or reflections) was always his most poignant verity, and savviest statement about cinema. A cheap French-TV project he shot largely in his own villa outside Madrid, this autumnal ditty is sourced out of an Isak Dinesen story, using only four characters and a bargeload of conjurers’ chutzpah. Welles (in theatrical greasepaint that evokes, of all things, the get-up of the 19-year-old Welles in The Hearts of Age, 34 years earlier) plays a dying nabob in Macao who enlists his accountant (Roger Coggio) to recreate, and therein disempower, a well-circulated story: about a rich man who hires a sailor to impregnate his wife. For the wife, the accountant hires a local courtesan (Jeanne Moreau), and for the naive sailor, a homeless teen (Norman Eshley). For Welles, this is virtually autobiography — orchestrating this simple fictional movie-within-a-movie is met with all kinds of recalcitrance and whimsical instability, and human vagaries that make a mess out of the “director’s” intentions. The low-budge textures of the film’s diegesis suggest a baser layer of deception: Welles’ makeup and dubbing, Moreau’s casting (she hardly gets to be very Moreau-esque), Eshley’s lumpy blandness, the transparently Spanish villages — all of it is as fake and as gestural as a card trick.
363/365: Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006) (Archive.org)
We are in a sun-dappled Mali courtyard (the filmmaker’s family home, as it turns out), in which a kind of tribunal is going on, complete with black-robed jurists, waiting witnesses, anxious journalists, and stacks of documentation. This is, we slowly realize, a fantasy trial in which the African people have taken civil proceedings against the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and U.S.-led global capitalism in general, for the crime of exploiting and loan-sharking the continent and its peoples. This isn’t a documentary, but the testimony is not from actors, but from real African citizens, writers, activists, tribal leaders, etc.; the lawyers, European and African, on both sides are also genuine advocates. In and around the trial courses a neverending flow of relaxed, workaday life, loiterers, babies, laundry, troubled families, goats, sunglasses salesmen, fabric dyers, well-women, and so on — Africanness rolling onward. Every one of Sissako’s shots is a deep-focus study in the irresistible press of life; beyond every passionate-witness-giving foreground is Africa itself, working and lazing and surviving. A beautiful nightclub chanteuse, whose marriage is dissolving, stops the court in mid-morning to have someone, anyone, tie up the back of her dress. The locals listen to the proceedings on loudspeakers, until they no longer wish to and watch TV instead (Sissako doesn’t let that opportunity slip by, inventing for broadcast a cheesy spaghetti western parable on cowboy diplomacy starring Danny Glover and Elia Suleimann). At one point, a wedding ceremony plows through the courtyard. But the witnesses are never deterred, and the core of Bamako is intense, eloquent testimony against the state powers that systematically, under the guise of aiding developing nations, rape them of resources and drain them through intolerable debt. (The name “Paul Wolfowitz” is spat out like a swallowed bug.) There’s no denying the integrity of Sissako’s assembled voices, especially once an elderly tribesman takes the stand and belts out a wailing, and unsubtitled, Bambara elegy of cultural woe, making everyone in the vicinity stop dead and go grave.
364/365: Enemies, a Love Story (Paul Mazursky, 1989) (Vudu)
By way of Isaac Bashevis Singer, this thoughtful, embraceable saga is set in the New York Jewish community in the late ’40s, when traumatized refugees and camp survivors flooded into the city, and the Catskills were a new haven for yiddishe immigrants. Singer’s story is a doozy: one well-intentioned Polish Jew (Ron Silver), living in Coney Island married to the goy maid (Margaret Sophie Stein) who hid him from the Nazis, maintains a passionate affair with a unstable fellow escapee (Lena Olin), who becomes pregnant. So he marries her, off the books — and that’s about when his other, first wife (Anjelica Huston), whom he had thought perished in the camps, shows up, leaving him with three wives and no sensible plan of action. Hilarious and vivid, it’s the finest, most deeply felt movie Mazursky ever made.
365/365: Tanna (Bentley Dean & Martin Butler, 2015) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
The first and only film to be made in Vanuatu, directed by two very white Australian documentarians, and a surpassingly lovely work that feels genuine and genuinely innocent. The story, based on a true Romeo-&-Juliet incident from 1987, has the inexorable force of a folktale, and the actors are all of them grass-skirted Yakel natives, exuding a vibrant naturalness, as if the camera, which is forever chasing them through the verdant jungle, simply wasn’t there. In such a tiny population, arranged marriages with other tribes are standard (and necessary), a custom that triggers the plot’s crisis, once a long-running blood feud with an adjoining tribe is patched with a marriage treaty, and the comely Wawa (Marie Wawa) cannot bring herself to abandon her true love, chief’s-son Dain (Mungau Dain). The free-flowing synergy between the acted story and the quite unfaked island life we see recalls Murnau and Flaherty’s Tabu (1931), and the film is deft and careful about bringing us close to these people and letting us enjoy their energy, their physical responsiveness to their world, and their extraordinarily broad smiles. Wawa in particular, despite being miles away from any common concept of screen beauty, is addictively, gorgeously watchable, but even the tribe’s old-timers have the wary gazes and grizzled sureness of character-actor pros. The sunny radiance of the Yakels’ rain forest could create a surge of Vanuatan adventure tourism.
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, 48, 49, 50, 51
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