Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 13
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
85/365: The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949) (Netflix, Vudu, Amazon Prime)
The rare universally beloved Anglo-American classic that still delivers on all pistons, this postwar Graham Greene-penned meta-mystery follows Joseph Cotten’s lost Yankee dolt as he arrives in a war-ravaged Vienna looking for an old friend (Orson Welles), who seems to be a black marketeer, and who also seems to be dead. Investigating the case, our hapless hero wades through a witty, buzzing sea of trans-European espionage, corruption, broken hearts, wrecked culture, and shady characters, only to eventually discover (spoiler 70 years on?) that his friend may not be dead after all. Shot in darkling noir tones by Robert Krasker (an Oscar), and constructed by Greene to be both a sophisticated mystery “entertainment” and a deft satirical portrait of postwar opportunism, the film has a spry personality all its own, as zingy as its zither soundtrack. Reed’s three-year run from Odd Man Out (1947) and The Fallen Idol (1948) to this film stands as one of the greatest auteur streaks ever.
86/365: A Trip to the Moon [etc.!] (George Melies, 1902) [etc.!] (Archive.org, YouTube, Netflix)
1902?! This morning star of a film reaches right back to the form’s infancy, cinema’s equivalent of cave-painting and hieroglyph-carving. But there’s something effervescent and seductive there, a spirit of high innocence and ceaseless invention that has made several of Melies images — most obviously, the man in the moon with the ship-bullet in his eye — undying cultural icons, familiar even those who aren’t particularly aware of or even interested in the fact the movies were being made during the McKinley administration. It’s become clear that Melies is more than just the stop-the-camera special-effects inventor and fin-de-siecle fantasist he’s normally defined as having been — or, that those definitions are more resonant cultural ideas than we have usually presumed. While it’s true, as per the classic historical argument, that his films occupy a 2-D theatrical space in comparison with the early Edwin S. Porters and D. W. Griffith, that’s quite a bit like dismissing Bosch because he wasn’t Rembrandt. It could be said that as a pioneer Melies expanded the cinematic vocabulary by skipping over the third dimension and extending toward a fourth — a way of seeing that evoked the unseen and the impossible, a use of recorded light that palpably smacked of the metaphysical. He elaborated on a space familiar to everyone then (the theater proscenium) and then, as if by magic, transformed it into the saw-it-with-our-own-eyes unreality of the ghostly and the subconscious. More than that, his actors (including Melies) were high-energy blasts, he only made comedies, always striving toward a life-embracingly irreverence, they’re all beautiful to look at, the first triumphs of filmic design (and the most thoroughly conceived until German Expressionism.) Watching Melies is like seeing a secret, a lost and ancient gray universe of pretechnological inventions, nursery-rhyme caricature, painted landscapes, cartoon Victorian affluence, trains and ships and cars that are obviously just facades but into which characters climb anyway, moons and stars (many of them) with human faces, outrageous cross-section views (Wes Anderson’s debt remains unpaid), deceptive perspectives, movies within movies, faeries and imps, classical paintings come to life, relentless disappearances and reappearances, and so infinitely on. It’s an arena of unfettered childlike-ness comparable, as pop art, to the career-work of Maxfield Parrish, Chester Gould, Cole Porter, Bing Crosby, Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Kirby, the Beatles and Hayao Miyazaki.
87/365: The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991) (Criterion Channel, Amazon Prime)
This magically intoxicating koan of an art film stunned audiences in its day, by way of a three-pronged aesthetic attack: the worshipful visual attention paid to dewy star Irene Jacob, the opalescent, world-through-a-teardrop cinematography of Slawomir Idziak, and the fundamentally enigmatic tale co-written, as were all of Kieslowski’s important films, by Krzysztof Piesiewicz. In a way, the story is quantum, constructed from both waves and particles: 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. They cross paths for a glancing moment (on a bus tour in Krakow); Polish maiden Weronika glimpses her doppelganger, but the French Veronique does not. An upset in an unseen astral balance is apparently been created, because thereafter the Pole dies (in mid-recital) of heart failure. Across Europe — across the same ideological and cultural lines that have separated the continent for most of the 20th century — the reverbs hit Veronique, who now feels as if a connection she’d felt to the universe has been severed, leaving her for the first time truly alone. There’s no possible way to beg for more concrete conclusions from this magnificent movie’s scenario than Kieslowski wants to give you; you either enter into this languid world of sensual reverence, global ghostliness and neverending questions, or you leave the room. Jacob, Kieslowski and the film won awards all over the map, most overwhelmingly at Cannes, where jaded festival goers stumbled out of the theater as if they’d been privy to a divine vision.
88/365: Mr. Freedom (William Klein, 1969) (Criterion Channel, Amazon Prime)
A busy ’60s shutterbug for the French Vogue, Klein more or less fell in with the Left Bank New Wavers (Resnais, Demy, Marker, Varda), but his perspective was New Yawk pugilistic, his humor was mercilessly accusatory, and his eye was unerringly sharp and expressive. He only made a few films; this wide-open lampoon foretells Team America World Police with its relentless, scabrous rip through American jingoism and xenophobic sloganeering, remarkably expressive of the Bush Administration mindset (its Rovian reasoning, press conference rhetoric and homicidal policies) even more accurately than it characterizes the American public personality during the ‘Nam years. “Antifreedomism!” is the danger confronted by Mr. Freedom (John Abbey), a ludicrous superhero-spy whose uniform is a melange of sports equipment, whose theme song actually misspells “freedom,” and who hollers at a huge-but-powerless inflatable SuperFrenchMan, “Are you with me, or against me?!” It gets surreal, with Mr. Freedom’s bout of stigmata, Delphine Seyrig in a peach Afro and tissue-thin gownless evening strap rallying the troops with a percussion band of tubby wrestlers, Philippe Noiret as the evil Soviet Empire (in a massive foam-rubber suit), and the U.S. Embassy-as-huge-discount-department-store-with-cheerleaders. Duck Soup and Les Carabiniers come to mind as antiwar companion pieces — is there higher praise?
89/365: Happiness (Todd Solondz, 1998) (Crackle)
Perhaps the most quietly appalling indie of the post-Sundance indie era, Solondz’s movie is such an unstable explosive that its original distributor, the bygone October Films, ran for the exits and left the film’s producers to release it themselves. It’s an ensemble satire on suburban desperation that goes exactly where you hope it won’t, centering on three grown sisters, one a frumpy spinster (Jane Adams), the second a gorgeous, haughty poetess (Lara Flynn Boyle), and the third a cartoony housewife (Cynthia Stevenson), and the web of lurking dysfunction around them, including a masturbatory apartment-dweller (Philip Seymour Hoffman), whose social ineptitude is as massive as his seminal output; the sisters’ secretly divorcing parents (Ben Gazzara and Louise Lasser); and, most unforgettable of all, Stevenson’s therapist husband (Dylan Baker), a gruesomely placid, Ken-doll uber-Dad stunned into confusion and fantasies of public slaughter by his own rampant pedophilia. Somehow, Solondz and Baker get away without judging this self-satisfying angel of havoc, and even yank astonishing laughs from his predicament (having to spike his son’s playmates’ snacks, etc.). It’s Solodnz’s achievement in splitting the atom that we absolutely connect with the man’s lonesome melancholy, even as his actions are quintessentially monstrous. Every one of Baker’s hushed scenes is a firestarter, and the wrenching climactic father-son talk, coming after the child rapes have become local news, just burns down the house. Needless to say, approach with tongs.
90/365: 12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006) (Eastern European Movies)
A winner at Cannes and a key film in the Romanian New Wave, Porumboiu’ farce explicitly addresses the 1989 revolution that ended the Ceausescu regime, a pivotal moment in the country’s sense of itself. Plopped down into a muddy, worn-down post-Communist Bloc village of newly capitalist predators and broken losers, on the 15th anniversary of the overthrow, we meet three of the trashy little town’s men: a smug, upwardly mobile local-station anchorman (Ion Sapdaru), a cynical history teacher completely wrecked from epic alcoholism (Teodor Corban), and an eccentric codger focused on playing Santa Claus for the local kids (Mircea Andreescu). The TV host’s show that afternoon will address the anniversary, and the resonant question, did the revolution happen in the town, or not? The comedy slowly leaks out of the inability to rope in anyone but the drunk and the old man as guests; once it begins, with the three men seated before the camera as if on a tribunal, the film is consumed with the broadcast and its collapse, as neighbors call in and rabidly dispute the teacher’s assertion of having participated in the historical moment, by being (as he claims) heroically rallying in the town’s square at the moment (12:08, December 22) that Ceausescu surrendered power. Authentically funny, in a boozy-Renoirian kind of way, with laughs dripping organically from the characters, observed in real time — a strategy as liberating as it is eventually brutally claustrophobic.
91/365: Putty Hill (Matt Porterfield, 2010) (iTunes)
This brooding exploration of a threadbare working-class Baltimore suburb takes the most salient aspects of the mumblecore trend — ultra-realistic lighting, non-directive camerawork, grungy Gen-Y spaces (floored mattresses, not beds), low-rent ambience, downbeat action and acting so naturalistic that little seems to happen — and invests it with crafty power. The most arresting departure from orthodoxy is to have the inarticulate young characters suddenly and at unpredictable moments begin fielding questions from behind the camera, as if they’re in a documentary, giving the whole film the air of an anthropological investigation. The central event is the recent O.D. death (or suicide) of a local twentysomething lad, which draws the scrubby community into a tight nexus of bruised psyches and lost lives. The heroine only gradually emerges from the crowd of wandering teens and dope-inhaling lowlifes — Jenny (Sky Ferreira), the dead boy’s cousin and a ragdoll-outfitted wastrel with an uncontrollable head of dirty blonde waves, who comes back to town for the funeral and has to suffer living with her ex-con/tattoo-artist Dad, whose cheap digs are full of seamy traffic and constant needle-work loud enough to warrant subtitles. We glimpse the relationships only in cross-section slices, when they’re not teased out by Porterfield’s off-screen interrogator, and the cast, is, predictably, all non-pro, assembled for a completely different film when financial backing vanished, leaving Porterfield to quickly muster a loose situational structure for the native Baltimoreans and then letting them improvise. As an example of how to make a true U.S. indie with a pure heart, rigorous intent and a mature eye, it might turn out to be something like a landmark.
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
Year One 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, 52
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