Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Week 6
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
36/365: Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, 2006) (Amazon Prime)
The near future, mankind can no longer make babies, the news reports that the last child born has died, cities are made of walled-off ghettos and racked with refugees and terrorist rebellions — as, maybe magically, a pregnant woman appears. Cuaron’s adaptation of P.D. James’ novel is a blistering vision, juiced by not just one but many of the most heart-clutching minutes-long tracking shots ever executed. State of the art sci-fi for grown-ups.
37/365: A Nous la Liberte (Rene Clair, 1931) (FilmStruck until 11/30; other availability TBD)
An effervescent classic early-talkie fantasy that pits the very French principles of romance, whim, passion and esprit against the soul-draining forces of authority and industrialization. The satire is sharp and playful both (the ex-con hero endures factory life made in the exact image of prison punishment, including guards, sung propaganda and systematized eating rites), making an entrancing pitch for anarchistic liberty, and joy. An underappreciated artist these days, Clair started out with the Surrealists, and in a 42-year-long career bounced between France and Hollywood; this is his most rapturous film.
38/365: Destiny (Fritz Lang, 1921) (Netflix)
One of Fritz Lang’s earlier German Expressionist epics, this silent medieval fantasy pits a lovelorn woman against Death himself, wagering that she can find another soul to take her dead lover’s place, through multiple ages and mythic locales. Lang’s yen for gargantuan set design and monolithic compositions — to explode a few years later with his Teutonic epic Die Nibelungen and his dystopic landmark Metropolis — first emerged here, and it’s a stunner. What it’s still doing on Netflix is anyone’s guess.
39/365: Heathers (Michael Lehman, 1988) (Hulu)
Talk about a movie that looks today like a scandalous impossibility — a widely-distributed and critic-beloved American comedy that makes nasty fun of teenage murder, school shootings, domestic terrorism, gayness, underage sex, bulimia, teen suicide, Christianity, and much more. Winona Ryder is a reluctant member of a bitch clique, Christian Slater is the Jack Nicholson-like new kid in school, and together they start offing their “popular” contemporaries, because, well, don’t they deserve it? Today’s teens might not believe it, but during the Reagan administration this bitterly hilarious movie was revered, and its makers didn’t see their careers end for making viewers feel “unsafe.”
40/365: The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967) (Amazon Prime)
One of the seminal movies of the American New Wave, this Mike Nichols comedy instantly acquired status as a generational testament — millions of American kids saw Dustin Hoffman, as a confused college grad swimming through his parents’ vacuous upper-class world and falling into a pointless affair with Anne Bancroft’s vamp-Mom, as an avatar of their own collision with the 20th century their folks’ generation had built, sick with soulless consumerism and moral compromise. Famous for being the first film to use wall-to-wall pop songs (Simon & Garfunkel) as a soundtrack, the movie still packs a punch, and radiates uncomfortable realism as only films of that era could.
41/365: The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949) (YouTube)
One of its decade’s greatest forgotten movies, this semi-noir centers on Joan Bennett’s SoCal uber-Mom, finicky and harried and gently domineering, who must struggle to save her nasty teenage daughter after the girl appears to have killed her much older sleazebag of a boyfriend. Ophuls was a master, and he pays close attention to Hitchcockian tension, especially with the breathtakingly physical five-minute-long sequence in which Bennett finds the corpse, drags it down the beach and loads it into the family dinghy and tries to dump it, all of it executed without a word spoken and, indeed, in almost complete soundtrack silence. The machinery of bad luck and bitter consequences is inexorable, and a good deal of the movie’s electricity comes from the fraying tension Bennett must manage in dealing with murder and blackmail while still maintaining a perfectly believable middle-class household.
42/365: Belle de Jour (Luis Bunuel, 1967) (Amazon Prime)
Luis Bunuel’s elegant, dry-eyed Surrealist mail bomb plunges into the lurking masochistic sexual daydreams of frigid housewife Catherine Deneuve, who works as an afternoon hooker, fantasies about whips and mud, humps an acquaintance she doesn’t even like under the table in a crowded restaurant, falls in love with a gangster with metal teeth, who shoots her husband out of jealousy (or does he?), and so on, crazily onward. And it’s a comedy, but a special, Bunuelian kind of farce, where the “story” may drop out from under you at any moment, and the characters may do virtually anything. Always the sardonic Spaniard, the last Surrealist, Bunuel is dead serious, and yet he’s laughing his head off.
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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.
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