Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 33
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
225/365: Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Google Play)
When is a movie more than a movie, but closer to being a lifestyle drug, a dream of utopia? Forsyth’s masterpiece seemed at the time to herald some kind of New Scottish Cinema, or at least a new and singular voice, but both ideas faded (Forsyth’s career bumped and ground but did not fly), and all we’re left with is this impossibly beguiling, absolutely peculiar film, a comedy without jokes but full of mysteries, hidden motivations, non sequiturs, mutations, portents and broken hearts. Burt Lancaster’s starlost oil magnate is only the MacGuffin; it’s Peter Riegert’s yuppie Yankee broker we follow, through a Scotch shore village so defiantly odd and distinctive yet completely real that it seems to exist outside of the film, when we’re not looking, and for sure the east coast town Forsyth used had to put up their own Local Hero phone booth to appease the many tourists that came, trying like Riegert’s MacIntyre to fathom their own inexplicable love. The thick vein of quixotic humor that oozes here can take any shape, any unexplainable running gag, any unpredictable quirk of personality (the doomed bunny, the ubiquitous motorcyclist, the African priest, the Russian submariner, the mermaid oceanologist), but it all gently coheres and has the breezy juice of an off-the-grid vacation day in paradise. It kinda died in its initial release — who’s surprised? — but since it’s become a cult movie in the best sense of the word: it’s a film people live in rather than simply see.
226/365: Celine & Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974) (BFI Player)
The Zeno’s paradox of New Wave masterpieces, Rivette’s arcane spellbinder giddily resists critical exegesis. No other great film may be as difficult to characterize. Break it down into summary and you risk sounding like an compulsive Aquarian Age geek lost in his own acid flashes. There is a decidedly Feulliadean Paris, as empty and mysterious as an abandoned playground; the two unacquainted eponymous Parisiennes (vampy Juliet Berto and tomboyish Dominique Labourier); a mysterious house they either discover or know about already; and a unchanging Henry James melodrama unfolding inside involving a child, her father (Rivette producer Barbet Schroeder), two untrustworthy women (Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier) and a nursemaid, enacted by either Celine or Julie as they enter or exit according to unknowable laws. Once it is discovered that the house’s ghostly tale — which, based on a Henry James tale, replays endlessly, and which is both a movie-within-a-movie and The Movies — ends with the murder of the child, the girls decide to intervene. In many ways the New Wave’s phantom outlaw, Rivette has crafted his own sphere over the decades, a haunted metropolis dripping with undecipherables, intuited connections, senseless but contagious suspicions, etc., and this is his springiest, zestiest tour of that city, a heroic dream in which there is no “reality.” Stirring and infectious, the film is almost an accident, an amateurish, whimsical epic that is only and entirely “about” the peculiarly, almost frighteningly delicious act of watching it, and if you let it it could change everything, least of all how you think about movies.
227/365: The Story of Film: An Odyssey (Mark Cousins, 2011) (Hulu, YouTube TV)
If you were to watch one documentary about the history of film, make it this 15-hour headtrip, which covers nearly all the vital bases while at the same time disrupting long-established ideas about what came first, who followed who, and what cultural arenas were the most fecund and explosive (meaning, the “Third World” plays a much larger role than film histories have granted so far). Cousins narrates with an at times nagging North Irish brogue, and literally travels the world, revisiting sites of studios and crucial film locations as they are now, contextualizing it all into a coherent flow that will, at the very least, whet your appetite for scores of films you’ve never seen, or even heard of.
228/385: Limite (Mario Peixoto, 1931) (YouTube)
This rare late-silent comes festooned with a cult aura, particularly among Brazilian cinephiles, who have on more than one occasion voted it the greatest Brazilian movie ever made. It’s also the only Brazilian avant-garde film from the salad days of the early-century avant-garde free-for-all, when silent film was being seized by bohemians and Dadaists and shaped into something much more like a DIY characterization of consciousness than a narrative record. Peixoto’s epic dream odyssey is rooted in the lost lives and mixed memories of three people in a drifting rowboat, but there’s virtually no large poetic idea it doesn’t embrace and intoxify; death, God, fate, love and the intransigence of nature are drowsily evoked in a ghostly two-hour montage scored with classical melancholia (particularly Satie), via beautiful pro-am photography and an imagistic naivete typical of the time and just as beguiling and haunting as the early films of Man Ray (whose photos reportedly inspired Peixoto), Bunuel/Dali, Dulac, Epstein and Deren. Languorous in the extreme, it is nevertheless a missing link, and it has a strange narcotic impact over the long run.
229/365: The Messenger (Oren Moverman, 2009) (Vudu, Tubi, Crackle, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Oscar-nominated if under-noticed in theaters, Moverman’s is telling, ethically vibrant film, a homefront war movie with a difference: unlike others in the “Best Years of Our Lives” paradigm, this isn’t about the discomfiture of soldiers returning to civilianhood, but about the task of manning the homefront, by reporting the dead to their families. We think Ben Foster’s vet is a buttoned-down battle case when he glowers at his reassignment after coming home wounded, but he turns out to be both less and more than we expected, as he and Woody Harrelson’s commanding officer endure harrowing home visit after home visit, both of them emerging as being complicated by rage and secrets and shame and vulnerability. The time spent absorbing wholesale grief (Moverman’s camera is always ready to hang back and give the victims air, while Foster’s hardass always wells up with tears but freezes), the conversations full of unspoken intention, the rhythms of scenes as the characters, responding to disaster, hunt internally for ways to react. And the acting is razor-sharp, down to Steve Buscemi as a soldier’s father, upping the film’s ante in his pivotal scene, and then raising it again later, unexpectedly.
230/365: 56Up (Michael Apted, 2012) (Netflix)
Michael Apted’s famous and beloved Up films, which have chronicled the lives of twelve Brits since they were precocious second-graders, keeps returning to these cross-section-ed citizens every seven years as if to see if they are in fact the same people. Of course, they are and they aren’t — people age, lose the fire of their youthful ambitions, marry, spawn, grow more peaceful and complacent, fatten, settle into routines. This epic project — recently registering its latest episode, 63Up — never stops expanding and deepening, and yet nothing cataclysmic happens. Apted’s twelve subjects (two of the original fourteen dropped out in their 20s) sit for the camera, disclosing the details of their lives (or some of them, anyway), and Apted continues, as he always has, cutting to the older footage, as if daring us to think we know these people after having seen them grow up from tykes into Brits looking at the business-end of middle age and now the gray years. A class-consciousness notion was in place in the first 1964 film, but preexisting agendas couldn’t survive the films’ real-time historical reach — life takes over, in all of its banality, private pleasures, employment struggle and divorce hurt. The cabbie, the housewife, the librarian, the lawyer, the physicist, the near-homeless outcast — all are used to the invasion of filmmaking crews into their homes, but as they age they’re no longer entertained by the quasi-celebrity, and tend to bridle and rebel. Talk about existential chill. The Up-pers move in the blink of the eye from being fresh-faced schoolkids to being weathered dinosaurs, typically beset by obesity, alcohol, emotional erosion, bad English dentistry and the savagery of time. It can get only scarier with subsequent entries, by which time they may be the most thorough and leveling portrait of ordinary humankind ever committed to film.
231/365: On the Silver Globe (Andrzej Zulawski, 1988) (EasternEuropeanMovies.com)
A berserk, one-of-a-kind science fiction epic, conceived and fashioned by Europe’s most notorious hyperbolist, the production of which was halted and destroyed in 1978 by the censors in Poland, who probably didn’t know what in the name of a pagan god to make out of Zulawski’s outlandish, gory, screaming-mimi footage but saw clearly that it wasn’t what the Politburo had in mind when it came to Communist culture. Zulawski expatriated to France in a depressed rage; after he returned to a democratized Poland in 1986, he was convinced by Film Polski and the loyal cast and crew to assemble the film anyway, shooting new footage, recording narration to fill in the story gaps, etc., for a kind of honorary screening at Cannes. Zulawski’s unique style reigns: skull-splitting psychotic frenzy is the default performance mode; no shot simply captures a landscape when it can scramble and catapult and race like a starving cheetah. This film’s story is pulled from a famous series of Polish science fiction novels written by Zulawski’s own granduncle, and here it is mostly told in narration over footage of contemporary Warsaw: A disastrous mission to the Moon (Zulawski used the Gobi desert and the shores of the Black Sea) spawns a primitive society that, a few generations down the road, hails an investigating cosmonaut as their messiah and warrior-king in the battle against a race of winged mutants. It’s the primal, ghastly originality of the Dantean visuals that brand the memory: the sea water in flames behind a slow-motion shore battle between moon-men and mutants; tribal dramas played out in what looks like a hand-carved cavern the size of a warehouse; cinema’s most appalling crucifixion; a mob of heretical victims impaled — as in, Vlad-the-Impaler-impaled — on 25-foot, intestine-roped stakes on the same beach, captured by Zulawski in a crane shot that launches high enough to hear one of the poor bastards choke out a few last words of protest. It’s an unfinished thing, whatever Zulawski’s intentions might’ve been, but you’re not likely to see anything else remotely like it, ever.
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, 31, 32
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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