Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 30
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
204/365: Vagabond (Agnes Varda, 1985) (Criterion Channel)
The den mother and too often sidelined feminist voice of the French New Wave, Varda made tempestuously experimental films that were also grandly generous of heart — except with this famous odyssey, which uses the Wave’s try-anything spirit to essay a portrait of utter doom. Sandrine Bonnaire, all of 17, is an unwashed girl hitchhiking through a French winter without any destination or plan — her working noncomformist principle is unalloyed freedom, which means, quite naturally, a litany of predation, neglect, social suspicion, and the struggle to simply stay alive. We know how she ends up from the film’s first scene, finding her frozen dead in a ditch — the film’s gritty pessimism goes hand in hand with its feminist rage, but in there somewhere is an even more troubling idea: is society by its nature a meat grinder for authentic individuals, people for whom rule-following is impossible? Is being a modern human mean relinquishing total autonomy?
205/365: The Saddest Music in the World (Guy Maddin, 2003) (Amazon Prime)
Maddin is an obsessive fabulist who creates his own antique roadshow from obsolete filmic vocabularies (early sound primitivism, Teutonic “mountain” films, silent-Soviet propaganda, seminal-stage Dada, etc.), and this is one of most accessible films, a deadpan comedy based upon a discarded screenplay by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. Depression-era Winnipeg — “the world capital of sorrow” — is a fuzzily-shot warehouse of cardboard houses; its Beer Queen of the Prairie, the owner of Muskeg Brewery and the hostess of the Saddest Music in the World contest, is Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini), a double-amputee nouveau riche with a satin-PJ-ed boy-toy installed in her factory office. Bilking the world’s populace by making them so melancholy they will drink their pennies away, she is just one corner in a lingering pentagonal tragedy otherwise occupied by two brothers (Mark McKinney as a glib Broadway producer looking to make big, and Ross McMillan as a tortured maniac posing as a Serbian cellist), their WWI-vet father Fyodor (David Fox), and an amnesiac Spaniard (Maria de Medeiros). Their fates are wrestled out in deliberately graceless ways during the eponymous contest — in which musicians from various countries play competitively at each other, the winner sliding into a celebratory vat of beer. And so on.
206/365: By the Time It Gets Dark (Anocha Suwichakornpong, 2016) (Amazon Prime, iTunes)
A languid Thai elliptical in the spirit of master of mystery Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Suwichakornpong’s second feature dishes out glimpses of narrative: a dilapidated house, over which students pray; an airport hangar where soldiers patrol hogtied children lying on their bellies, carefully documented by an incongruous photog. A famous activist, now aged (Rassami Paoluengton), comes to a rented vacation home in the country to be interviewed on video, as research for a film about aprotest massacre in 1976; flashbacks bring us back to her student debates about democratic strategy. Back in the now, the power goes out; walking in the bamboo later, the intimidated young filmmaker (Visra Vichit-Vadakan) hallucinates a boy wearing tiger pajamas, chases and loses him, and finds instead a mushroom that glitters like quartz. She wakes up crying, has tea in the darkness with unnamed ghosts, and records herself recounting her childhood experience of telekinesis… George Melies is quoted, a tobacco worker becomes an international movie star, we return to the rented house with the same characters but played by different actresses making different choices. Is the film-within-a-film about the massacre actually the film we’re watching?
207/365: Le Corbeau (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943) (Criterion Channel)
Few movies have had as contentious a relationship with social reality and history — as in, who writes it, and with what agenda — as this wartime melodrama about a small French town beset by a plague of poison-pen letters and the destructive fuel they provide to the rumor mill. Clouzot’s film was made during the Nazi occupation, a situation that made every action and cultural statement suspect from every corner. Resistance or collaboration? Clouzot laid into provincial pettiness and presented a witch-hunt scenario wherein the innocent pay for the mob’s madness, and upon the film’s release, institutions ranging from the Catholic Church to the Nazi-erected Vichy government to the Resistance press to the Communist party were offended by the movie’s implications and publicly decried it. Is it a masked critique of generalized, oppressive social power or an indictment of French collaborationism? Could it have been both? Centered on a rather recalcitrant doctor (Pierre Fresnay), who is not a native of the town in question and who quickly gets fed up with its citizens’ skullduggery, it’s a Rorschach blot to be debated, because the answer is emotional, not political. Having been made for Continental Films, the Goebbels-designed company that controlled French film production during the war, Clouzot’s movie could be seen as either an act of spectacular subversion or an artifact of prosecutable cooperation.
208/365: Pavilion (Tim Sutton, 2012) (Vudu, Amazon Prime)
A ravishingly shot slice of teen-ness that eschews narrative altogether in favor of a moody, watchful wistfulness, this mild-mannered debut begins in upstate New York, where the dusky Malickian lawns are endless, and ending up in the arid horizontals of Arizona, with Sutton loitering and observing teen slackers at play and in repose. Specifically, he focuses on three kids in succession as they cross each others’ paths, walking through woods, zooming across public spaces in ritualized mountain-bike mobs, getting high, goofing off, saying nothing rather than risk vulnerability. Sutton is invading Van Sant territory here, but his eye for the wide shot and his confidence in the meditative pacing are all his own. It’s an anthropological film that hinges on our openness to the simplest moments — as when a smiling Mom watches her son and a girl swim in a lake at sunset, or a boy‘s long hair whips in the wind while driving. So vaporous it seems to disappear like steam, it’s a lovely sonatina of a film, brief and aching.
209/365: Hearts and Minds (Peter Davis, 1974) (Films for Action, Amazon Prime, iTunes)
Not only the definitive American documentary about the war in Vietnam but a landmark political action, Davis’s film was built to outrage, appall and indict. Interested primarily in the conflict between real experience and the propaganda lingering in stateside mouths, the movie is rich in its depiction of war but also fascinated with the hypocrisy of middle-class militarism, whether in and around a high school football game or a 1776 reenactment — itself counterset against Ho Chi Minh’s hope that America would be empathetic to the similarly righteous Vietnamese war against the French. (We were, instead, funding nearly 80% of the opposition.) Radicals still maintain that no one acknowledges the American invasion as such, but Davis’s witnesses were saying the words in 1974, and in an Oscar-winning film. Still, Davis’s best moments are quite Eisensteinian: cutting from a Vietnamese capitalist hopefully outlining his future plunder to a busy factory rapping out limb prosthetics, or a heartbreaking funeral scene, complete with loved ones assailing the coffin, followed by beefeater General Westmoreland asserting that “Orientals” don’t put “the same high price on life as does the Westerner.” How much of this asinine hellfire does anyone care to remember anymore? There might be five documentaries no American should be able to finish public school without seeing, and Hearts and Minds belongs on the docket.
210/365: Monty Python’s Life of Brian (Terry Jones, 1979) (Netflix, Amazon Prime, iTunes, Google Play)
The comedy sextet’s second feature, and an excoriating rip through Christ movie cliches, Roman Empire-era society, Christian ideals, and modern norms, as an unassuming Judean named Brian (as before, Graham Chapman as the straight man) is mistaken for the Messiah and heads toward crucifixion. Any world peopled almost entirely by the Pythons is a place worth visiting, especially here for Michael Palin’s dazzling battery of characters, from the Boring Prophet to the chattiest dungeon dweller in film history to an outrageously rhotacistic Pilate. Brilliantly hilarious in a concentrated way only the Pythons could manage, and chin-deep in killer bits.
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, 29
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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