Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 29 — Meta-St. Valentine’s Day Edition
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
197/365: The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-wai, 2013) (Netflix)
Wong is the modern auteurist’s dreamtime superhero, and what he’s done here — even more so than in Ashes of Time — is convert the martial arts saga, with its strange hierarchical struggles and ideas of honor and repetitious matches, into an imagistic opera, a roaring aria of Wongian rue, romance and mourning. None of the epic and wickedly shot-and-cut battle scenes matter in the story so much as a single coat button, representing as so many innocent but totemic objects do in Wong a heartbreaking as gorgeous as falling snow. You can half-shrug off the ostensible story — the tale of early-century martial artist Ip Man, who eventually went on to train Bruce Lee — because, at least, it’s the subject of more than a dozen other lesser Chinese films. Wong’s is form over ostensible “content” — music over text. His menu of woozy poetry and gorgeous melancholy, counteracting rhapsodically but also absurdly with the action, comes close to being what’s beautiful about cinema.
198/365: A Married Woman (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
If you were asked to name the 15 features Godard made between 1960 and 1967 — still the most thunderous run in cinema history — this might be the one you’d forget. “Fragments of a film shot in 1964… in black… and white,” as JLG subtitles it, the movie has all the formal and attitudinal earmarks of classic-period Godard, but it also possesses a distinct narrative focus and a uniquely grim and despairing tone. No hijinks here, and no Anna Karina — his eighth full-length film considers in relentless detail the not-unsympathetic amoral faithlessness of a young French wife (Macha Meril), who bounces from lover to husband and back again. It is fragmented: whispered interior narration, abstracted lovemaking sessions (thighs, back, belly; the censors made Godard cut the frontal nudity), logorrheic episodes in which all three characters, plus three bystanders (including the heroine’s young stepson) hold forth on the philosophies of love and personal meaning. Then the woman finds out she’s pregnant. Godard gets shockingly personal here, and infidelity isn’t a plot device, but the object of inquiry; of course there are no answers, just subjectivity.
199/365: In the Fog (Sergei Loznitsa, 2012) (Fandor, Vudu, Google Play)
Constructed with the same patient sorcery and elliptical menace as Loznitsa’s previous art-ordeal My Joy, this WWII saga opens like a tracking-shot Bosch painting and quickly settles into a slice of Belorussian purgatory, where an innocent rail worker (Vladimir Svirski), already captured then released by the occupying Nazis, is automatically judged a collaborator and marked for execution by the local militia. Loznitsa is allergic to exposition, and it takes a while for the film’s iron maiden scenario to become apparent. Shallow graves, unwanted corpses, twists of fate and no possibility of escape — with abrupt flashbacks folding over each other at unsignaled intervals, the odyssey through the wilderness proceeds into As I Lay Dying terrain, and Loznitsa makes sure the physical trial stays close to the ground and leave bruises, using long takes, hardbitten hyperreal imagery, and, reportedly, only 72 cuts.
200/365: Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947) (Amazon Prime, Vudu)
Film noir is one of American culture’s greatest and most eloquent vernaculars, and this cool, crepuscular odyssey is the perfect gateway drug, as Robert Mitchum tries to do the right thing despite femme fatale Jane Greer and crafty Mr. Big Kirk Douglas entwining him in their homicidal pas de deux — or is it, as feminist scholars have maintained, really a film about Greer’s used, abused kept woman fighting back at the patriarchal world with the only weapons she has, sex and violence? Filthy with snappy dialogue delivered with brio and strength, it’s Tourneur’s best film, and standing beside I Walked with a Zombie and Stars in My Crown, that’s saying a bunch.
201/365: Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999) (Netflix, Vudu, Amazon Prime)
PTA’s third film, and an unruly, ever-expanding tapestry of all-American baloney, hucksterism, materialistic craziness and self-deception, weaving together a motley crowd of San Fernando Valley head cases and lost boys, from John C. Reilly’s inappropriate cop to Tom Cruise’s macho-man motivational speaker to Julianne Moore’s freaked widow-to-be to William H. Macy’s faded quiz-show legend, and so on (plus Philip Seymour Hoffman, Melora Walters, and Alfred Molina, and, to fill in the connection between this film and Robert Altman, Henry Gibson). Structured around Aimee Mann songs, and culminating in a head-slapping whazzit reconstitution of a Biblical plague — or is it a miracle? — it’s an inspired big-bite of a film, one that may require several viewings.
202/365: Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993) (Fandor)
From today’s perspective, it seems remarkable that there once was a filmmaker like Derek Jarman, and that there was a time — not the crazy, New Wavey ’60s, but the Thatcheriite ’80s and early ’90s — that allowed him to thrive and regularly found room in its international movie theaters for his films. With a unique, confrontational, celebratorily gay, overtly avant-garde sensibility, Jarman was the moment’s jester prince, and, not to mention, the one figure most instrumental in giving gay cinema a chance to be regarded as pioneering art, not just politics, and to evolve into what became known as the New Queer Cinema. Dead in 1994 from AIDS at the age of 52, Jarman was immediately a sadly missed rogue element in contemporary culture, and his work evolved from lavishly historical (Caravaggio, Wittgenstein) to this terminal work, which is famously not quite a movie at all, but a complex narration and soundtrack playing behind (beside? atop?) an empty but bright blue screen. Jarman’s text, about the decay of his body and eyesight in the grip of AIDS, and about his closing life already emptied of friends and lovers, is wry and intimate, and its relationship with what you’re seeing — and not seeing — is, to say the least, disquieting. The absence of visuals is both a potent metaphor and a kind of ordeal you endure and come out cleansed.
202/365: Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong, 2007) (Criterion Channel, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Google Play)
In many ways the mash-up Cassavetes/late Bergman of the Korean new wave, Lee might be peerless today in terms of the firepower inherent in melodrama, deep-dish character study and crafty, painful storytelling. This is only Lee’s fourth film (and the slow-roasting follow-up to 2002’s Oasis), and it is, expectedly, a scorching ordeal by circumstance and emotionalism. The heroine, Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon), a willowy, not-terribly-pretty young mother and widow, relocates to the obscure (and eponymous) village her dead husband was native to, for obscure and perhaps only whimsical reasons. Reserved and introverted, she instantly draws unwanted attention in town, both cool (gossipy neighbors) and warm (the men, including congenial auto mechanic Song Kang-ho), as she attends to her willful brat of a grade-school son and sets up a storefront piano school. The tepid percolation of the story explodes when the boy is kidnapped and then soon found dead. Shin-ae is thereby launched through the harrowing gauntlets of grief catatonia, desperate Christian conversion, leveling disillusionment (she decides to “forgive” the imprisoned killer in person, a scene that unleashes ex-novelist’s Lee’s sharpest blades of irony), and scattered self-destruction. Shot and staged at a medium distance (we never get close enough to Shin-ae to “comfortably” share her pain, or know exactly how to react to her), the movie is almost analytical in its view of Jeon’s molten protagonist (a Best Actress trophy at Cannes, for what is an unrelentingly tortured performance), but inconclusive — you look under the angst and tribulation, and the lengthy scenario scans like a wrestle with the idea of God, with no certain winner.
Year Two 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
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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