Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 35 — Quarantine 4Ever Edition
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
239/365: Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, 2010) (Tubi, Vudu, Amazon Prime)
The Korean New Wave’s weapons-grade dramatist, equally devoted to lyrical visual ideas and the immediacy of character under ferocious pressure, Lee is strong drink, even if this overlooked film feels, in comparison to Oasis, Secret Sunshine and Burning, relatively gentle. Veteran Korean star Yun Jung-hee, something like the Korean Ellen Burstyn and long retired when Lee seduced her into making the film, stars as 66-year-old Mija, a rather feather-headed widow-grandmother stuck in a small town nurturing her ne’er-do-well teenage grandson, and caring for a wealthy stroke victim to earn cash. Dreamy but practical, easily hypnotized by flowers, in love with floppy hats and floral print outfits, cultured but actually not very educated, Mija is a caterpillar who forgot to metamorphose into a butterfly, and implicit in her every action is a quiet resistance to the disappointment of her life. So she decides to take a poetry-writing class, just as Alzheimer’s disease begins to muddy her waters, and as she’s confronted with fathers of her grandson’s friends — who inform her that a drowned schoolgirl committed suicide because the sons were all gangraping her for months. Now, the parents have banded together to cover it up, a situation that requires a mountainous infusion of cash — cut to Mija, who only wants to sit on a park bench haloed by songbirds and poetic auras. It’s best not to divulge too many of Lee’s silent-napalm-strike moments and searing poetical juxtapositions, leading up to a final passage that takes literal flight in ways only cinema can manage.
240/365: Paris Belongs to Us (Jacques Rivette, 1961) (Criterion Channel, Vudu, Amazon Prime)
Rivette’s epochal debut was the chilly, existential side of the French New Wave, a film that numbly tracks the life of a young student (Betty Schneider) as she meets up with Parisian neighbors and an ad-hoc theater troupe putting on Pericles; their rehearsals are inexplicably tense, their parties are funereal, and their conversation is dominated by talk of murders and/or suicides, the victims of which we never meet, some of whom might not even be dead, or “exist” at all. Love lives intertwine and drama leaks out like ignitable propane, but mostly the almost 2.5-hour dream-saga is a comatose nightmare in which a deadened sense of paranoia envelopes you without anyone saying a single explicit thing to suggest it. In a word, it’s Rivettian, and a rough-hewn masterpiece, if predominantly for what the movie creates in the air between screen and viewer, outside the ordinary channels of communication. The mysteries of Paris — the sense of a secret city within the visible one — was Rivette’s signature trope, extrapolated upon the aura of the pre-WWI ominous, zoomy, Rivettesque-before-the-fact serials of Louis Feuillade.
241/365: I Married a Strange Person (Bill Plympton, 1997) (Tubi, Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
An idiosyncratic, all-hand-drawn cartoonist whose pregnant-pause, restless-color-pencil style is one of a kind, Plympton goes all feature-y with this at times wildly funny comedy, which is as gory as it is musical, with the artist’s penchant for bending, twisting, folding, inside-outing and generally mauling the human form unleashed in a flood of mutilation, decimation and incineration gags. The plot, such as it is: a newlywed hunk, via the intervention of a stray laser or something, develops a node on his neck that materializes his every wish, daydream and wandering thought. So, you get a family dinner in which the mother-in-law is uncomprehendingly subjected to an army of beetle pouring down her throat, a lawn that battles to the death with its mowing owner, a talk-show comic who rips his own limbs off to get laughs. The money scene here, beyond the vast number of ways Plympton figures out to waste the evil military hordes that want the node for themselves, is the marriage’s consummation, a lengthy all-pencil sex scene in which the wife is objectified into a hundred absurd dream identities (including, finally, a huge pair of expanding, house-bursting breasts), accompanied by every inanimate object in the room telekinetically miming the coital action. Forever shifting awkwardly even when nothing is moving at all, his drawings do a lot of thinking, and still the characters never seem to understand what’s happening to them even as they’re run over by an amorous tank or whatever.
242/365: Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927) (Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube, iTunes)
Murnau’s career-peak nova, the crowning film from that sacred, edge-of-the-abyss year of 1927, has been so commonly and universally hallowed that today its antiquated narrative tone and outrageous sexual politics can give you uneasy pause. But oh how little textual complaints matter if you’re caught in the silvery path of this perennial and succumb to its ordeal by light. Every discussion of cinematic movement and its marriage to meaning begins here, a Hollywood “prestige” project that left ’20s audiences cold (it debuted exactly two weeks before The Jazz Singer instantly turned silent film into yesterday’s jalopy) but remains one of the medium’s genuinely fresh experiences. That is, individual passages (the marsh walk, the trolley ride, etc.) are so lyrically tactile, so swoony in their intention to transform your spectatorship into something else, that their experience is like music you hear with your eyes, and they virtually define what is “cinematic” from that point on, away from the old debts to novels and theater. It’s also just a melodrama, a story of a marriage’s collapse and restoration and mortal trial, but the achievement of Murnau and his team is having made the film move in ways that aren’t narrative, only poetic.
243/365: Sonatine (Takeshi Kitano, 1993) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
A stand-up TV comic turned laconic badass-slash-pseudo-art-film pulpmaster, Kitano became a sensation in the ’90s, and this is his most eccentric movie, a marvelous conundrum and gangster saga with a story so elliptical it’s virtually an anti-movie, boldly sidestepping filmic narrative’s common tools and preferring instead a voracious sense of unpredictability and rhythmic discontent. The main narrative involves a small platoon of yakuza, led by Kitano’s taciturn, aging general Murakama, who are sent to Okinawa to quell a gang war that never happens. When the mob is the target of a bomb, they retreat to a seaside cabin and await orders — which also never come. Loafing and goofing around, playing practical jokes on one another, having mock battles at night with bottle rockets, hanging with a beautiful young local girl, staging mock wrestling matches, etc. — until until, of course, clues are planted for us regarding both the preordained fate of the young mobsters and Murakama’s unsettled frame of mind, eventually both leading to a bloodbath. We’re no better informed than its luckless protagonists, and Kitano carries that principle to its extreme — we’re never fully informed about the plot, the character’s motivations, the passage of time, anything. Which sounds frustrating, but the focus falls instead on what’s really happening: the in-between moments, the unpredictable flow of life in which, say, a violent situation between criminals can suddenly yield humor and intimacy. Kitano is often characterized as Yasujiro-Ozu-meets-Tarantino, but he’s actually quite Godardian, in the spirit of affectionate detachment, unpredictable non sequiturs indulged in for their own sake, and movie-movie gameplaying. The film’s ratio of high crime to high-spirited slumming recalls Godard’s Band of Outsiders, a fact that could not have eluded super fan Quentin T., who sponsored the stateside release.
244/365: The Marquise of O (Eric Rohmer, 1976) (Tubi, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play)
There was a time when sunny, gabby, romantic Eric Rohmer films would appear without fail every year, opening at urban screens for rapt uptowners, in what seemed to be a rite of Film Culture’s erstwhile salad days. Some of the Rohmers were chilly curveballs, though, like this adaptation of the Kleist classic, made entirely in West Germany and set during the Napoleonic Wars. Edith Scob is the aristocratic maiden rescued from a soldiers’ gang rape by noble count Bruno Ganz, whose subsequent marriage proposal seems a little rushed until it’s followed by the realization that the marquise is somehow mysteriously pregnant. Old-school European righteousness gets a flogging, but it’s the distinctive way Rohmer crafted the film that backlights the emotional/moral crises. Completely without music, and shot in a flat theatrical style that cinematographer Nestor Almendros still manages to make golden, the film’s almost ironically uninflected, like a tense game of chess. But soon, like a bolero, the no-nonsense two-shots and scarlett-satin self-consciousness lets the story build to genuine fireworks. No costume-drama escapism here, just distilled social warfare.
245/365: Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) (Hulu, Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube)
The spiffy, suave, James M. Cain-based mega-noir that spawned a billion scheming-bitch thrillers, this expert night of the Hollywood soul is such a genre axiom it practically scans like a mid-‘40s shopper’s catalogue for noiristes: fedoras, Venetian blinds, cigarettes, leaking bullet wound, treacherous blonde, serious-as-cancer slang-banter, dumb doomed men everywhere you turn. Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray become unforgettable, delicious cliches the minute they cock their eyebrows at each other in and around Wilder’s shadowy LA interiors, but this film was also the moment, as the war still raged, when noir had its first real bloom, basking in the cold-blooded algebra of two amoral bastards plotting the death of an innocent jerk, and as we all watch them do it, we hope it works. The darkness has been with us ever since. Wilder climbed to the A list with this hot dog (something like the Book of Genesis of prenup-advocacy scenarios, no small matter in Hollywood then as now), and the Oscars threw nominations at it, but oddly it was a box-office mediocrity, buried by lighter fare. Any attempt at standard cultural literacy can hardly survive without it.
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, 34
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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