Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 39 — Quarantine Week 6
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
267/365: The Girl on a Motorcycle (Jack Cardiff, 1968) (Tubi, Amazon Prime)
This semi-legendary groovy-hippie-road-movie-classic manque, by master cinematographer and shameless pulpifier Cardiff, is some kind of lost-time ditzy beaut. What may’ve been mere youth-patronizing schlock in 1968 (Cardiff’s intention was clearly to make an iconic, sexy Brit answer to Easy Rider) is now a hilarious throwback visitation from an era of druggy surrealism, free love, devil-may-care back-projection and the feeling in the air that not wearing underwear under your one-piece leather jumpsuit was a socially radical act. Marianne Faithfull, looking in her only starring role a bit like a druggy, nicotine-stained Susannah York, leaves her connubial bed, zips up the cowhide, jumps on her hog and rides endless foggy highway from France to Germany, where a hunky but rough Alain Delon awaits her. Flashbacks and voice-over thoughts intercede, as do frequent solarized fantasy sequences, and confrontations with various flabby old men, condemning the fair and free lass with jaundiced eyes. Based on a French novel (bien sur!), the movie is daft, if as well, given Cardiff’s long path of intersections as a DP, it bears an odiferous relation to several Powell-Pressburger epics, coming off almost as a Swinging London remake of The Red Shoes.
268/365: Vincere (Marco Bellocchio, 2009) (Hulu, YouTube, iTunes)
Bearing the vivid energy of a seasoned master, Bellocchio’s film — his 25th, amid many shorts — recounts the early days of Benito Mussolini and the fate of his lover/revolutionary comrade Ida Dalser, scrambling history with this new thing called cinema, as if the 20th century began as one giant, crazy newsreel. It’s a tale about public appearances, political performance and collective madness, beginning with the lead up to WWI, as Mussolini (Filippo Timi), a union leader, stumps for anti-monarchal revolution and gathers his power in public meetings, marches, battles with police and fiery trysts with the wild-eyed Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). Historical movies that try to lasso together complex streams of social history can often be dull or simplistic, but Bellocchio grabs the bullhorn and makes political action action-packed; the movie is hot under the collar, rocketing from riot to sexual coupling to ideological duel (all of which can and do happen in movie theaters). Once Dalser becomes pregnant and Mussolini returns wounded from WWI and she discovers he has a wife and kid already, the hot-blooded demimondaine’s fate seems etched in stone: he rises in fame and power as she is shunted aside and, eventually, locked away in an insane asylum. The title translates as “Triumph,” Mussolini’s dictum throughout, human cost be damned, and by the end, the Fascist leader remains an enigma, as obscure to us as he is to Dalser, as distant as a figure in news footage.
269/365: Shame (Ingmar Bergman, 1968) (Criterion Channel, Google Play, Amazon Prime)
Gritty, tormentous and supple, this atypical Bergman film takes on the Euro-homefront experience of war, in which life slowly shifts from a state of petty complacency to, literally, drifting in a sea of corpses. Liv Ullman and Max Von Sydow play the Rosenbergs, a painfully average, childless couple who run a small farm in the hinterlands of some unnamed European country; she is officious and sensible, he is sloth-like, nervous and distractable. Their stasis is destroyed on a trip into town, where the portents of war — rumors, drafts, stories circulating around town about concentration camps — escalate into the stuff of nightmares when jets fly low over the Rosenberg homestead, and the nearby forest explodes into flames. Their farm smack dab in the middle of a spastic LZ littered with dead paratroopers hanging from trees, the couple is soon confronted with a local bureaucrat with an agenda (Gunnar Bjornstrand), who is now a POW-disposing official. Who may be winning is irrelevant: the Rosenbergs are beaten by one side, as their house is later torched by the other, and the circumstances changes them: she is systematically disempowered by the anarchy, while he graduates from being a blithering coward to a ruthless, looking-out-for-number-one survivalist. Pure as a war film can get — that is, unsullied by prejudices, rationalizations or knee-jerking — the movie is a universal yet miniature vision of ordinary life run amok and under fire, apocalypse on the half-shell.
270/365: Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) (Hulu, Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
“Gilda, are you decent?” someone asks; cut to an empty frame, into which the bare-shouldered Rita Hayworth flips her Breck-Girl-Goddess hair into view and grins, “Me?” You know instantly you’re in for it: here, Hayworth is the feminine principle in movies crystallized, a locus of sexual radiation so intense it outshines this tough noir’s other capacities. Playing a classic femme fatale caught in a masculine struggle for criminal power (which means also that, as per feminist theorists, she can be read as a woman using her sexuality to survive in a rapacious man’s world), Hayworth eats the film up in a shocking way, handling the double-entendre dialogue with a saucy grin and glimmering eyes, leaving no doubt that whatever else is in play (between gambler Glenn Ford and suave boss George Macready), it’s her sexual favors everyone is vying for. When she launches into the showstopping “Puttin’ the Blame on Mame” nightclub number in a black satin dress, long gloves and immaculately naked armpits, anyone who’s seen it has the brilliant and maddeningly unattainable image of her branded on their brain for life.
271/365: Before Night Falls (Julian Schnabel, 2000) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Google Play)
Art-world celebrity Schnabel’s second film, after Basquiat, this headlong adaptation of Reinaldo Arenas’ memoir tracks the pilgrim’s progress of the Cuban poet and novelist, who grew up dirt poor with the Castro revolution. Arenas was also a gay man possessed of an almost cosmic horniness, and Schnabel’s movie captures not just the writer but the packed-shorts libertine who wouldn’t stop hooking up no matter how much the Communist regime persecuted or jailed him for what he was. Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, Michael Wincott and Olivier Martinez show up in peripheral roles (Depp has two, actually, one them being a rectal-smuggling prison drag queen), but at the film’s center, as Arenas, is Javier Bardem, whose remarkable performance nailed him an Oscar nomination and made him a global star, and whose shy physical confidence and alert intelligence are never less than riveting. Like Arenas, who was something like a Latinate Walt Whitman in his appetites, the film has a yen for the messiness and ecstasies of life, and what’s more, it’s a neat history lesson on the evolution of modern Cuba, which ends for Arenas (who eventually died of AIDS) with the infamous Mariel Harbor boatlift.
272/365: Night Flight (Clarence Brown, 1933) (Vudu, Hulu, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Google Play)
From the credits’ post-Art Deco fabulousness to the now-hyper-retro, pre-steampunk iconography of roaring monoplanes and leather-capped daredevil pilots, this beautiful antique was manufactured and marketed as a kind of aerial Grand Hotel but today landing as something quite different. Based on an Antoine de Saint-Exupery book, the David O. Selznick production is actually a bit of a mess narratively; focused on the early-century hazards of airborne mail deliveries flying at night, a slew of barely related characters are trailed after, and an impatiently awaited delivery of polio “serum” traveling from Santiago to Rio de Janeiro is neglected for much of the running time. John Barrymore (clearly pickled) is the harried head of the plane company, Robert Montgomery is a hedonistic pilot, Clark Gable is another, more taciturn pilot stuck in a storm, Helen Hayes is his anxious wife on the ground, Myrna Loy is the anxious wife of another pilot, etc. Not a single character seems to actually be South American in any way. Brown (with, it’s safe to assume, Selznick’s prodding) emphasizes the visuals, fortifying the ground scenes with gorgeous pre-Wellesian shadowplay and in-depth compositions, and letting his aerial cinematographers bask in some authentically breathtaking above-the-clouds imagery. But face it, we don’t look to the assembly-line matinee product of the early ’30s for masterpieces or accomplishments in story construction — this is a cataract of nostalgic bliss, a let’s-get-lost black-&-white vision of silk gowns and leather flying suits, giant wall maps and pre-Code double entendres, hulking radios and dangerously threadbare technology, primitive superimpositions (a plane’s “shadow” laid rather beguilingly over landscapes of grazing sheep) and toy miniatures. The special atmosphere of being in a plane at night — the menacing quiet, the suspension, the listening — becomes how we watch the movie now, in a transported daze. In 1933 this was exotic cinema-as-adventure-travel, however scattershot the story, but today it’s only more so, a visit to the intoxicating pop past as vivid and lovely as a museum dedicated to our grandparents’ daydreams.
273/365: The Thorn in the Heart (Michel Gondry, 2009) (Amazon Prime, Kanopy)
You know you can trust a filmmaker, to be an artist and not a slippery hack, when he salts his Hollywood-comedy resume with documentaries about his own family. Gondry’s film is essentially a home movie, and as such is both very Gondrian and exactly what name directors aren’t supposed to spend their time on, especially since the meat of Gondry’s family isn’t sensational or tragic or even terribly funny. Like all home movies, and to some mysterious extent all cinema, it’s about time, its unstoppable passage and the residue it leaves behind. But Gondry’s slippery, goofy, savvy approach remains: he sees no reason why he can’t recreate real locations as toy-train replicas, have family members reenact things he didn’t get to film, and use stop-motion animation. His focus is the family matriarch, his elderly aunt Suzette, a somewhat prickly but congenial ex-school teacher, whose timeline takes up most of the 20th century; complicating the portrait is Suzette’s grown ne’er-do-well son Jean-Yves, whose gayness and misfit persona presented Suzette with a lifetime of disappointment. There’s French history, too (Suzette remembers the mass relocation of Algerians into her district decades earlier, and meets one that’s still there), and the ruckus Gondry’s film crew has caused in the household, and Suzette’s often poetic determination to remember everything accurately despite the fact that she’s often wrong. An educator through and through, Suzette takes Gondry into a contemporary 4th-grade classroom, where her q-&-a climaxes with the distribution of green-screen shirts, making the children (or portions of them) invisible to the camera. You need a sharper visual metaphor for the transience of youth? Of course, eventually Suzette et al. examine footage from the film they’re in. We’re all stars of our own movies, and done with a little originality and spark, each of our movies is worth seeing.
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, 35, 36, 37, 38
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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