Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 31
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
211/365: Angels & Insects (Philip Haas, 1995) (Amazon Prime)
Based on a novella by neo-gothic authoress A.S. Byatt, this seething period art-thriller is set entirely on a huge, slightly decaying Brit estate, and follows a meek, middle-class naturalist (Mark Rylance) hired by the well-meaning patriarch (Jeremy Kemp) to sort out his own vast collection of insect specimens. With his attentions divided between the eldest daughter (Patsy Kensit), a dewy, mysterious beauty pining away after a failed romance, and the pinched, wary nanny (Kristin Scott Thomas), aristo-lunacy ensues, with the entomological research reflecting and refracting the family’s overindulged lifestyle (down to servants and children hovering around the gargantuan mother like an army of worker ants around a queen). There are bugs everywhere, snowstorms of live butterflies, but as in any tale allied to natural systems, sex and dread are closely entwined — Kensit makes an appallingly limpid and irresistible temptress. Far from just not shying away from what makes ordinary costumers quake in their riding boots, Haas’s movie casts a cold, steady eye on the pathologies of privilege, and its modest budget only contributes to the pervasive mood of dry rot.
212/365: Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980) (Netflix)
Thirty-nine years before he revisited, yet again, the mid-century Eastern-city crime-family territory in The Irishman, he crafted this indelible masterwork, a pulsing, intimidating portrait of toxic masculinity and American violence, around the so-what life of Mob-resistant middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta, who was only suited for fighting, and who burned through the American Dream like a short fuse. Immersed in New Yawk street savvy, introducing the world to Joe Pesci, giving Robert DeNiro his crowning opportunity to transform his body into an Oscar-bait travesty, and all the while bringing a sense of his own redemption to every lavish, operatic frame (why else make such a beautiful a movie about such a louse except to seek your own Christ-like blessing?), Scorsese would’ve been a giant if he’d stopped right here.
213/365: A Time of Drunken Horses (Bahman Ghobdi, 2000) (Fandor, Kanopy)
The planet’s lone major Kurdish filmmaker, Ghobadi has also been the most satirical and least self-conscious of the big Iranian New Wave voices; suggestively, every one of his films, starting here, have found American theatrical release. His films bristles with appalling realism and grim truth in one of the world’s most troubled landscapes, and among film artists of state-less nations — now there’s an idea for a retrospective — Ghobadi may be preeminent because his films have been both accessible and uncompromising. This debut threw down the gauntlet for the filmmaker’s merciless sense of trial, as in ultra-realist fashion his camera follows a family of orphaned siblings high in the snowy peaks of the Zagros foothills who try everything from smuggling to selling themselves to raise money to save a sickly dwarf brother. Thanks to Sharia law and the debt to Italian neo-realism, Iranian movies have always been thick with juvenile tribulation, but this film jacked the idea onto a Biblical level, while still maintaining a terrifying documentary integrity. You never doubt this didn’t happen, and happens still.
214/365: The Children Are Watching Us (Vittorio de Sica, 1944) (Criterion Channel)
A pre-war movie star turned Neo-Realist auteur, de Sica was particularly deft with children and children’s perspectives, and his filmography is filthy with watchful, nervy, lippy brats, all of them real as slapped tears. But even rewatching Bicycle Thieves might not prep you for this earlier film, an overlooked masterpiece that didn’t correspond to the poverty-centric topography of Neo-Realism, chronicling one little middle-class boy’s travails as his swooningly wayward mom (the delish Isa Pola) follows her heart, abandons her family, and destroys everyone’s lives. Six years old at the time, the headlight-eyed Luciano de Ambrosis has the unaffected rawness of a bruise forming, and de Sica shapes the film around him as a low-to-the-floor centrifuge of silent bitterness, unanswered questions and gossipy catastrophe. No one acknowledges what’s really going on — the boy’s internal ruination — because everyone has their own agenda, and the upshot might be the first great film made about parental damage.
215/365: Lines of Wellington (Raul Ruiz & Valeria Sarmiento, 2012) (Tubi, YouTube, Amazon Prime, iTunes)
When Raul Ruiz died, he was on the verge of finishing preproduction on another Portuguese historical epic, a Napoleonic-era weave like the grand hyper-narrative quilt of Mysteries of Lisbon, but set intractably amid the wandering and flux of 19th-century warfare. The film was shot and finished by Ruiz’s widow Sarmiento; the finished mastodon, cut down from a Portguese mini-series, could not find release in the English-speaking world — despite a cast that includes Isabelle Huppert, John Malkovich, Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Michel Piccoli and Chiara Mastroianni. Thick and busy and bursting with character, the film plunges into a forgotten historical moment — the Peninsula War, in which a Western European coalition fought Napoleon for the Iberian plot, and in which a line of British-conceived forts protected Lisbon from the cataract of French forces. Beginning with the French defeat in 1810 at Serra do Bucaco, the history is confidently dabbed in and clear, despite a dizzying array of alliances, betrayals, national ambivalences and turnabouts. Mostly we follow the multi-national regiment as they keep one day ahead of the French, trailing behind them a parade of refugees that include a young and nervy Brit nympho-aristo (Jemima West), a romantic teacher/scholar (Alfonso Pimentel) hunting for his not-so-lost wife, a robust and practical prostitute (Soraia Chaves), and so on, across a surreal body-strewn landscape populated by generals, guerrillas, deserters, Poles, spies, militia-leading priests, and onward.
216/365: Intolerance (D.W. Griffith, 1916) (Tubi, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
The first great juggernaut of auteur ambition, and the largest experimental film ever made, this famous landmark might not make up for The Birth of a Nation, but carved out movie history trying. Famously weaving four narratives together in an accelerating bolero (modern-day union-busting, life of Christ, the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre, and the Persian siege of ancient Babylon), the movie commands space and scale like an advancing army, from the first modern-day ballroom scene (a deep-set composition learned from Feuillade and then tripled in size) to the Brueghelian crowd scenes in every segment to the famous Babylon set, which remains stupefying and far more impressive than the entirety of The Lord of the Rings simply if not exclusively by virtue of it being 100% physically real. If the Christ sequences and the St. Bartholomew thread are overshadowed, the famous and still bizarre weaving of the four narratives, leading to four separate climaxes, remains an inspired and fabulously crazy megamovie gambit. But what about mea culpas? How about Griffith’s headline-ripped evocation of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre in the modern-day narrative stream, assembled with proto-Soviet montage electricity? Using that fourth of the film to wail about a then-recent labor atrocity, and to publicly denounce coal industry godhead John D. Rockefeller Jr., was not an unrighteous move. Intolerance famously crashed and burned in any case — name your box-office poison: sanctimony, length, the movie’s cinema-interruptus structural uniqueness, the lingering ethical unease left in a jaded public that by the time WWI was under way didn’t quite know how bad to feel about how excited they had been by Griffith’s previous epic. It’s one of cinema’s great vexations, an astonishing and Herculean visual achievement cursed in various amplitudes by auteurism, guilt, memories of bigotry, evolving norms, and the power of cinema itself.
217/365: Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011) (Hulu, Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
A convincing, epically distressful what-if badtime story that’s suddenly prophetic come 2020, this crackling film has Gwyneth Paltrow’s Patient Zero, a Minnesota wife and mom returning from a Hong Kong business trip, bring a completely accidental new viral admixture with her, as if in retribution for the sins of our modern privileges. That she dallied during a Chicago layover to cheat with an old boyfriend only makes the cosmic judgment more inescapable. Certainly, Soderbergh knows how to laser-focus his film on the minutiae of viral transmittal, so that every doorknob and coffee cup becomes a fearsome tool of disaster. The first half, roughly, is a merciless iron maiden of mysophobic anxiety, from Paltrow’s very first off-screen cough (and the image of her dead scalp folded over her forehead in autopsy) to the Andromeda Strain-like scientific fact-finding, chillingly overwhelmed by an incurable disease too easily and quickly transmitted to track. Much of the film’s redoubtable tension is delivered in the terrified eyes of the authority figures on hand, including bureaucrat Laurence Fishburne, field expert Kate Winslet, researcher Jennifer Elhe and disease investigator Marion Cotillard, each chin-deep in authentic techno-speak and growing more frozen by the minute, as the infection zones grow worldwide, the corpses begin to pile up, and lawless panic descends on city centers. Matt Damon, as Paltrow’s immune widower, brings his usual urgency to a one-dimensional role and makes it sing, particularly when he’s edged all too tentatively into Panic in Year Zero territory. In the film’s grip you’re hard pressed to rest easy, and your reflexive attitude toward public coughing and common surfaces may take a beating.
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, 30
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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