Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 34 — Quarantine Edition
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
We’re joking, kinda — this week’s 365 isn’t specially suited for viral times, because all of Smashcut 365 is primed and usable for your-2020-stuck-at-home viewing needs. Start here and track backwards, and we’ve got the next 600 days covered.
232/365: Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1999) (Criterion Channel, YouTube, EffedUpMovies)
One of the ’90s most stunning debuts, this bloodied-knuckle Scottish nightmare is structured around the traumatized perspectives of a beleaguered Glasgow lad (William Eadie) as he negotiates a fracturing landscaping fairly run amok with rats, garbage, decaying housing estates, abusive men, beaten women, and poisoned families — but amidst the neglectful, violent chaos Ramsay finds a poetic voice, as if to manifest for us the moment-to-moment struggle of the child’s will to reach for wonder and autonomy in a world that obviates both. Filthy with lyrical and sometimes painfully beautiful images, as well as with incidents of chilling brutality, it’s an uncompromised movie, and one of the very best made anywhere about childhood.
233/365: Cairo (W.S. Van Dyke II, 1942) (Vudu, Google Play, Amazon Prime)
Back in the Hollywood heyday when you didn’t go to A Movie but to The Movies, you often received, like a pie in the face, skylarking and utterly bewitching trifles like this wartime farce, a studio product that takes its narrative mandate so lightly you come away with a clearer sense of how much fun it was to make than of the film’s ostensible story. Written by nobody John McClain (but hatched by playwright Ladislas Fodor, whose rambling globe-hopping career in movies included five Mabuse sequels), this unpretentious goof begins in a movie theater showing a Jeanette MacDonald feature — where a grumpy patron asks a lady to put her obstructive hat back on, rather than have his nap disturbed by the film. Soon we’re introduced to Robert Young’s eager journalist — whose tabloid wins the coveted “America’s Most Difficult Small-Town Newspaper” award — who is therein sent on an international mission, gets lost at sea, and lands in North Africa with drippingly urbane spy Reginald Owen. (A stray gunshot summons a horde of eager-to-surrender Italians over a dune.) Now involved in wartime espionage, in Cairo Young’s rube runs across MacDonald’s movie-star-in-hiding (who’s also a spy, performing in Egyptian nightclubs and singing in Morse code), and she hires him as her butler. Certainly one of the first, if not the first, flat-out spy spoof (the introductory card “irreverently dedicates” the film to spy authors in general), the movie always finding time for schtick and irrelevant song numbers, usually featuring Ethel Waters, as MacDonald’s savvy maid. Full of digs at Hollywood, sly winks and broad character bits, the movie comes close to manifesting, in its own way, the Godard/Tarantino idea of movies as a living, spontaneous, self-referential game.
234/365: Senso (Luchino Visconti, 1954) (Criterion Channel)
Visconti’s fourth feature and the bridge between his neo-realist origins and the ambitiously posh monsters he generated in the ’60s and ’70s, this 1866-set melodrama tracks the downfall of a Venetian countess (Alida Valli) as she gradually abandons her marriage, her aristocratic standing, and even her faith in and commitment to the revolution, all for the sake of a headlong, frankly sexual romance with an amoral Austrian officer (Farley Granger). The hair-yanking propulsion of the story (scripted by vet Suso Cecchi d’Amico) may have been exactly what Visconti needed most, but there’s also no denying the film’s often breathtaking visual attack, with its on-location Venice clutter, opera-house mise-en-scene (the opening shot is a 270-degree spectacle), vast bloodied battlefields and interiors that are meticulously detailed and yet shot as though they were trompe l’oeil, operatic backdrops that come eerily to life. In fact, the drama lives within the architecture, breaking palaces into telescoped passages of doorways and windows, and cities into vast mazes through which Valli’s self-destructing lover stalks in moneyed gowns and symbolic veils, creeping along the walls like a hunted rodent. The movie’s climactic heart, in fact, is a 13-minute triangulated face-off in a single room; Valli, in a career performance, screams as if burned at the stake.
235/365: Terribly Happy (Henrik Ruben, 2008) (Amazon Prime, iTunes)
A Coen-style noir comedy of goosebumps and squirmings, this Danish beaut is a devilishly pleasing vacation in Schadenfreudeland, where bad things happen to unassuming jerks and we watch, hypnotized but safely removed. The noir staples are revivified: a big-city Copenhagen cop with a shady past (chiseled yet troubled Jakob Cedergren) is reassigned to northern Europe’s shadiest, muddiest, nowhere town, which he gradually realizes is actually as thick with secrets, corruptions and evil pacts as the nearby bog is with bodies and God knows what else. The vibe is familiar and rarely better evoked: the sense of entering a new town or country seething with unspoken enigmas and an incalculable measure of xenophobic hostility. Genz never spills all of the town’s mysteries, and Cedergren’s edgy policeman isn’t too interested, either — until a young, battered wife seeks his help against her husband (Kim Bodnia), and our hero finds himself gradually slipping into the lust-&-blood spiderweb of all noir heroes, and becoming a townsperson himself, covering his tracks and living a lie. This part of Denmark, as Genz shoots it, knows no sun, and Genz’s tone never falters, down to the bitter end.
236/365: Here Is Your Life (Jan Troell, 1966) (Criterion Channel, iTunes, YouTube)
However little seen in the ’60s outside of Sweden, and however unremembered in the decades since, Troell’s feature debut is one of the New Wave era’s mega-bildungsfilm epics, a nearly-three-hour mood piece about growing up in the Norrland high country at the beginning of the century. Adapting a three-volume autobiographical novel by eventual Nobel-winner Eyvind Johnson, Troell starts with the hero, Olof (Eddie Axberg), as an inarticulate working-class boy we first meet glumly departing from a foster hospice and returning to the home that was too poor and too disease-ridden to keep him. From there, the film is a fluttering ribbon of impressions and experiences, with little or no exposition or context surrounding them, and none required: Olof bops from job to job, lumbering to brickmaking to servicing a pioneering movie theater to assisting (and bedding) a spirited but aging carnival floozie with her rifle-range concession, etc., but we understand the passage as in-between details and moments, overheard conversations, dalliances with girls, views from train windows, memories of hard work. Along the way, the watchful but not terribly vocal Olof becomes slowly radicalized, in the WWI years of nascent Bolshevism, democratic socialism and bohemian anarchism, and his politics chop up against his employers in a building crescendo, as Axberg seems to actually age with time. Troell throws in New Wave trick in the book: freeze-frames, double exposures, extreme perspectives, cutaway evocations of memories and dreams, elliptical time jumps, and so on, shot (by Troell) in lustrous black-&-white when the film doesn’t in fact burst into hazy color. Without being seen much at all, the film seems to have influenced everyone from Terrence Malick to Miguel Gomes.
237/365: The Tales of Hoffmann (Michael Powell, 1951) (BFI Player)
It’s not really a question of whether you’re in love with a Powell/Pressburger film, but which one — and cultists often go for this hellzapoppin filmization of the Offenbach opera. With stops pulled out by P & P’s resident design team, and choreography by Brit-ballet arch-pope Frederick Ashton, the movie is as intensely expressionistic as any film since Caligari, and at the same time a veritable nova of springtime élan. The exultant brio that always thrived in the pair’s films is here finally and completely cut loose from reality, in a mega-terrarium of living puppet people, greasepaint, distorted scale, dream spaces, toychest clutter, unstoppered swoonings, and free-for-all quasi-antique design — think Randolph Caldecott plus George Melies plus Yves Tanguy, plus a heady dose of Jack Smith make-believe. Offenbach’s tale, concocted by librettist Jules Barbier from three E.T.A. Hoffmann fables, places Hoffmann himself (American tenor Robert Rounseville) at the center, as he recounts to a tavernful of acolytes his three tragic tales of love — doomed romances with a beautiful automaton (Moira Shearer), the consumptive daughter of an overbearing composer (Ann Ayars) and a soul-stealing courtesan (Ludmilla Tcherina). The film is so committed to its netherworld that there’s not even breathing room for camp — even if virtually every set and image is making explicit sport of something, be it 19th-century social norms, melodramatic conventions, or ballet itself.
238/365: The River (Jean Renoir, 1951) (Amazon Prime, iTunes)
Well-heeled with decades of kudos (and citations from the Andre Bazin contingent), Renoir’s late sigh of a movie revels in Technicolor vistas of Indian landscape, brooding with mottled shadow and glowing flesh. (It was shot by Renoir’s nephew, Claude.) Adapting Rumer Godden’s novel about a Brit-colonial girlhood spent on the banks of the Ganges amid swarming siblings, pure-hearted locals and a certain visiting veteran (the forgettable Thomas Breen), Renoir fashioned what might be his sweetest movie about family, and one of the postwar years’ most serene cinematic statements. Many old-school cinephiles would trade the last two decades of movies for the courting scene on the dark stairwell, where the young pilot unconsciously swats the moths alighting in Adrienne Corri’s thick red hair. Overlook the cliched exotica and the Euro-white condescension — it’s Renoir, after all, and all political considerations wither in the shadow of his optimistic humanism, an indomitable sensibility dedicated to the warm bounce and emotional intercourse of love-loyal relationships.
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, 33
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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