Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 16
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
106/365: I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964) (Amazon Prime)
Communist agitprop’s most unrestrained diva hymn, and one of the most visually titanic works in the century of movies, this Soviet-made ode to the Cuban revolution uses, famously, superhuman cinematographic stuntwork and unearthly infra-red-stock exposures to express unfettered revolutionary outrage, abstractly detailing life before and during Castro’s rebel war. The resulting assault is so impassioned it’s less about Cuba per se than the fusillade of movement, shadow, light, vertigo and landscape on the viewer’s tender optic nerves. It’s a film known to make ordinary people who’d ordinarily dismiss the notion of a black-&-white, subtitled movie weep openly. And it’s a bit of an exhumed fossil — a one-off co-production between Mosfilm and Castro’s new state-run ICIAC, Kalatozov’s film proved too languid for Cubans and too exotic for Russians, and it bombed and vanished, unseen in the West and forgotten by virtually everyone else. Decades later, it was rediscovered and shown in a Kalatozov sidebar at the 1992 Telluride Film Festival, and now it’s an integral piece of film history.
107/365: A Mighty Wind (Christopher Guest, 2003) (YouTube, Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play)
The third of Guest’s American-microworld mock-documentaries (or fourth, if you count This Is Spinal Tap), this deft farce trains its laser-sight on the decaying legacy of Peter, Paul and Mary-style pop-folk. Gingerly avoiding the cruel patronizations of Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show, and reserving open-faced mockery for show-biz Gollums like Fred Willard’s tanning-salon-blanched events manager-cum-ex-comedian, the film exploits that most ludicrous of fading-boomer-culture manifestations, the one-hit-wonder reunion concert. The disinterred players include the DisneyWorld-inflected The New Main Street Singers, who do not have a single member of the original 60s group among them, and The Folksmen, a banjo-pickin’, novelty-number b-side to Spinal Tap, with lead doofus Michael McKean, warblin’ nerd Guest and Amish-bearded, bass-thumpin’ Harry Shearer. The movie’s secret weapon is Mitch and Mickey, a lovey-dovey duo played by graying SCTVers Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara. After having their video-clip history traced and their breakup pondered, the two meet again, Levy’s Mitch having dissolved into a basket case of gray locks, stunned eyes and spastic speech. Never less than hilarious, Levy somehow sneaks a tragic dignity into this sinkhole of an ex-celebrity, whose culminating performance on stage verges on the transcendent.
108/365: The Draughtsman’s Contract (Peter Greenaway, 1982) (Criterion Channel, Fandor, Amazon Prime)
Greenaway has been one of the most defiantly untraditional and perversely idiosyncratic filmmakers working, ever since this ’80s oddity took him out of the avant-garde. This structuralist mystery stills hums with high wit and delirious pleasure, in its fusion of pop-baroque music (Michael Nyman’s score is a head-shaking triumph), lavishly composed imagery, fecund Brit-speak, and the farcical-yet-accurate reinvention of the 17th century. The bounce of intellectual game-playing never ceases, from the first bon mot-clotted frieze to the active engagement of the story, which has the wife and daughter of a repellant landowner, while he’s supposedly away, persuade a draughtsman (Anthony Higgins) to draw the estate in 12 careful sketches, a process that involves sexual intrigue and, Blow-Up-like, the recorded evidence of a murder plot. Greenaway lent the film a uniquely waxen quality, arranging his ludicrously bewigged, candle-lit cast in flat art-history tableaux and filling their mouths with absurdly thick Thackeraian verbiage, all of it so arch and masterfully delivered that the very idea of a British aristocratic tradition begins to feel like a sour joke.
109/365: 4 (Ilya Khrjanovsky, 2004) (Kanopy)
A raging, unsettling, rule-incinerating monster of a movie, treating the rules of orthodox movie narrative like toilet paper and engaging in irreverent structuralist hijinks that’d be hilarious if in fact the film wasn’t chilling to the bone. The screenplay is by notorious avant-garde novelist Vladimir Sorokin, who has been attacked and censored in Russia by neo-nationalist groups looking to suppress “dangerous” culture. Even “dangerous” isn’t too strong a word for Khrjanovsky’s movie (his first), which begins with the static shot of a nightened street where four very tense dogs are sitting, when from outside of the frame, giant hydraulic demolition hammers — four of them — attack the asphalt and send the dogs fleeing. The dogs, in fact, never stop wandering for the rest of the film. Then we cut to an after-hours bar, in which a hooker, a meat wholesaler and a skinhead piano tuner meet in a bar (the film does have the structure of a prolonged joke), and proceed to spin fabulous lies to each other; one extraordinary thread involves cloning. But who’s lying? At home, the hooker gets a cryptic message and disembarks for the post-Soviet frontier, back to a prehistoric village where dolls made off chewed bread, pagan burial chaos still reigns, and only two of the hooker’s three identical sisters are still alive. Khrjanovsky is fearless in his devotion to ridiculous ambiguity, possibly meaningless metaphor and long, breath-holding takes, and however berserk and bedeviling it might seem on first viewing, 4 has a way of implanting itself in your reptile brain and haunting your daydreams for months afterwards.
110/365: Rocket Science (Jeffrey Blitz, 2007) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Seethingly articulate yet lyrically at a loss, this coming-of-age indie comedy chronicles a very particular high school tribulation: the ambitions and fraught esteem crises surrounding serious debate team competition, which unceremoniously allows the characters their own hyper-learned way of speaking, even as his nebbishy hero (Reece Daniel Thompson) battles with a disastrous stutter. Failing even to order pizza for cafeteria lunch because he can’t get the word out, Hal (Thompson’s is a masterfully constipated performance) sees a way up out of the mud after being “recruited” for his high school’s debate team by a go-getter hyper-student (Anna Kendrick), and although that may sound like the plot for a dumb-feel-good Hollywood movie, Blitz’s film always sidesteps and dodges the cliches; rarely if ever do the characters — from Hal’s problematic mom to a voyeur neighborhood kid to a deposed debate king — behave in a predictable fashion, or speak as if they only have one thing on their minds. (Hal’s simian big brother, played by Vincent Piazza, is perpetually on the verge of exploding from unexplained teenage fury.) This approach sometimes forces things to fizzle — many scenes that seems to be leading up to an easy joke end with none at all — but most often the movie feels spontaneous, thoughtful and hard to pin down. There is also, not very incidentally, the best-ever use of Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun.” But having spent so much time already observing the lives of smart kids, Blitz brings no preformulated thematic ideas to the table about teenagers and high school. It’s just life, lived by people too young to understand it.
111/365: Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2006) (Tubi, Amazon Prime)
As pensive, studied international art films go, Ceylan’s best film couldn’t be clearer in its essaying the ordinary collapse of a long-term relationship — and yet it communicates its emotional weather to us in ways that shock us with its secrets. A couple — an older but worldly architecture professor and his younger designer mate, played by Ceylan and his real wife, Ebru Ceylan — are vacationing in Greece, photographing the ruins. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but then we discover it’s already happening: the camera unceremoniously lingers, and lingers, on a closeup of the woman’s face as she watches her man, and we see her forget her life, and then remember it, and then mourn it, crying. From there, sorrow comes to town. The relationship dissolves the way they do in reality, and in Raymond Carver stories — with a derisive chuckle, with an unanswered question, with a secret nobody knows who knows. Because the characters behave like real people, we participate emotionally in their scenes as if we were present, exploring on our own what may’ve happened in the past and what’s going on behind their eyes now. Ceylan’s camera favors observant angles, but it’s mostly a character study of the man, a charming, sophisticated academic lost in his own life. It’s a great film thanks to its maker’s subtle and restrained eloquence; a kind of one-man Turkish new wave, Ceylan reminds you what it’s like to have every shot count, and count hard.
112/365: Last Year in Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Famous as the uber-art film openly mocked by Pauline Kael and the authors of The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, Resnais’s saturnine masterpiece remains exactly the film experience it was originally intended to be: a dream inside a puzzle inside a story that never actually takes place. Is there a better, more eloquent way to define movies? Cavils are absurd, because the film so obviously avoids being a “normal” movie in every frame; on the most fundamental level, it is a ravishing formal achievement, patrolling in drunken, swoony slow-motion through the Neoclassical hallways, ballrooms and elaborate gardens of an apparently infinite hotel-palace, a stomach-churning, cobbled-together location that is the film’s most vivid character (decadent but hollow), and a fantastically expressive statement about wealth, class, narcissism, and the dying European aristocracy. (Kael lovingly slammed the film as a “Come Dressed as the Sick Soul of Europe Party.”) Resnais began as a liberal documentarian, and the film’s architectural hyperbole is no accident. But the core of the film is, of course, more mysterious than that: it is an exercise, or a triathlon, on the very slipperiness of narrative, and therefore of memory. In this cavernous maze of ornate filigree and looming artworks, the comatose guests stalk or sometimes just stand, and we follow one such tuxedoed zombie (Giorgio Albertazzi) as he attempts to make a woman (Delphine Seyrig) remember that they had, in fact, met and engaged in a romance the previous year, maybe in Marienbad, maybe here. He spins yarns and speculations like a talkative Beckett character, she toys with him, plays along, he doubts his memories, moments and slices of dialogue repeat themselves, and the film never establishes anything “happening” in the present tense — just a rumored sense of a past that might never have been. Written and conceived by nouveau roman pope Alain Robbe-Grillet, it’s both a hypnotic trance to endure and a text intended to be interpreted in an infinite variety of ways; it was the latter aspect that made the movie both spectacularly popular back in a more adventurous filmgoing age and vulnerable to low-brow attack.
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
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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