Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 4
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
22/365: Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, iTunes)
However you dress it — as the earthbound B-side of a Surrealist dream-film, as a koan-puzzle whose very lack of a solution is the source of its beauty, as a drowsy parable on childhood’s end and feminine unattainableness — Weir’s career-making sophomore film has the unquantifiable allure of an opium jag. Impenetrable believe-it-or-nots like this are usually strange-but-true, and Weir knew it, subtly playing up the seemingly factual aspects of Joan Lindsay’s Borgesian tale, in which three Australian schoolgirls circa 1900 inexplicably vanish into or around the titular rock site during a St. Valentine’s Day outing. It’s a stupefying true story that never happened, envisioned as an idyll of linen, blonde hair, pollen-heavy breezes and cosmic portent. Weir shoots the rock itself as somewhere between the monolithic house in The Haunting and Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch Zone, in looming fragments and discombobulating corridors, but what chills and thrills is the movie’s dance between the literal and the elusively metaphoric, whether you find yourself lamenting the tragedy of Miranda (Anne Lambert), the ethereal tamale who seems most conspicuously drawn toward the Whatever It Was, or of Sara (Margaret Nelson), the sullen poetess left behind, who loved Miranda and wanted only to get lost with her.
23/365: Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonca Filho, 2012) (Vudu, YouTube)
A magnificently rich Brazilian city symphony set in a middle-class ‘hood in Recife, where old money abrades lower-class servitude, families wage silent warfare, community thrives despite modern distractions, and everybody has secrets, some dark, some feather-light. Filho nonchalantly bops from one scenario to the next, and does it with a visual grace and affection for his characters’ ambiguities that smacks of Renoir and Rohmer. A tense single mother (Maeve Jinkings) faces off against the barking Weimaraner next door while hiding her prodigious pot habit by exhaling into her vacuum, a young land-dynasty scion (Sebastiao Formiga) brokers apartments and woos a moody girl, an amateur street-security team arrives and convinces the street’s denizens to pay for its patrol. Glancing off over a dozen lives, and dosing us with beguiling jolts of surreal humor and hints of dread, the film scans like early Paul Thomas Anderson but better — Filho has an eagle’s eye for the irony of how wealth confines the wealthy as the poor run free, and how class relationships manifest as equal parts love and fear. In the last quarter or so, the blandly-titled film waltzes into more dread-filled regions, haunted by history, and the film’s balance between generosity and menace may well be unique.
24/365: Panic in the Streets (Elia Kazan, 1950) (YouTube, Vudu, Amazon Prime)
Essentially a noir-era police procedural — with an epidemiological MacGuffin at its center — Kazan’s early film is one of the wisest, most convincing, most enthrallingly detailed portraits of American life produced in the pre-New Wave era. Shot on location in New Orleans, the thriller follows Richard Widmark’s Public Health Service officer in his desperate efforts to trace the roots and spread of pneumatic plague before it slips the leash of circumstance and hits the country at large. Kazan, so hot in the late ’40s it’s a wonder he had time to sleep, had already made five films and won an Oscar; here, he paints a roiling, tempestuous portrait of the city, using scores of locals and filling every corner of the film with genuine launches of hypnotic street business and immigrant personality — Chinese, Greek, Irish, Mexican, Italian, as if the rundown port city itself is comprised only of foreigners on their way to somewhere else. Famous for great “Method” showboating performances and rarely lauded for visual acumen, Kazan had the mixture in reverse this time, shooting his pulp story with an edgy fluency that could’ve made Joseph H. Lewis jealous, and shepherding a vast ensemble cast toward a seething realism no one else knew from in 1950.
25/365: Pontypool (Bruce MacDonald, 2008) (iTunes, Shudder)
Low-budget, Canadian and sneaky as hell, McDonald’s ersatz horror film is set entirely in a local radio broadcast booth in a tiny Ontario town, where Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), a grizzled, boozy, pretentious shock jock whose downward career spiral has landed him in the provincial wilderness, begins during the morning-drive drudgery to receive reports of what seems to be a zombie plague of some kind. We never see the “zombies,” only hear of them — which is not only infinitely creepier, but also the key to this tense, absurd film. Gradually, amid name-checking Absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco, cyberpunk novelist Neal Stephenson, and semiotic critic Roland Barthes, the characters figure out (spoiler, kinda) that the “virus” is language itself, and of course that’s what the film is about — the errancy of second-hand knowledge, the fallibility of communication, the toxicity of rhetoric in a political world, literally and irrationally transforming an orderly society into raving madness. Sound familiar? McHattie is outrageously believable as well, but nothing beats a horror film with a meaty thematic roast to slice up.
26/365: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010) (Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Thai master of mystery Apichatpong Weerasethakul makes films that are radically different than both mainstream multiplex fare and Euro-Asian “art films” — they are in fact without precedent, and are therefore difficult to parse, to analyze and even to discuss. He could better be characterized — buckle up, here come the poetic critical hyperbole — as an enabler of magical experience. Don’t resist that phrasing, because it applies rather succinctly to the films, and because it describes an essential aspect of cinema in general, its unique capacity to conjure hypnotic experience, its basic form as a visual corridor in which we forget ourselves, and its inherent use as ravishing spectacle and transport. This winner-at-Cannes is nothing if not triumphantly irrational, and seemingly disinterested in narrative per se, though it has story, beginning with an aging widower slowly dying of kidney disease on his jungle tamarind farm, where his aging sister-in-law (Weerasethakul regular Jenjira Pongpas) comes to care for him, and where they are visited by both the ghost of his wife, who gradually becomes corporeal enough to change his dialysis dressing, and his son, who appears, after having disappeared many years earlier, as a red-eyed, fur-covered Bigfoot-ish “monkey god,” and who naturally has stories to tell. That’s merely the first half-hour or so; from there, Weerasethakul dallies and meanders and observes at a pace and in a bemused way that may be Buddhist but is also distinctly his. Folktales, transmogrifications, glimpses of metaphysical mysteries, tours through the jungle, sly jokes, surreal references to military violence following Thailand’s 2006 coup d’etat, all scrambled leisurely together and adding up to something beatific and vacational that you live through, not consume or interpret. Late in the film, as Boonmee and his coterie travel through ancient caves, he asks off-camera, “What’s wrong with my eyes?” Someone answers: “They’re open.”
27/365: The Dawns Here Are Quiet (Stanislav Rotstotsky, 1972) (iTunes)
This patient, heartbreaking Soviet-propaganda war film was nominated for a 1972 foreign-film Oscar and then summarily forgotten, but it might just be the only war film in which the beleaguered infantry is made up entirely of women. Frustrated by his drunk, distractably horny male soldiers, a squad leader far from the front line is assigned a fresh crop of young female anti-aircraft gunners, all flushed with eager comradeship, each with her own fragile hopes for the future. Soon, of course, a Nazi party presses them into armed conflict, with their avuncular C.O. torn between duty and guardian-guilt. In Soviet culture, an inspiring ending meant tragic martyrdom, not salvation, and this generous, heartfelt film packs a teary punch. Remade in 2015; stick with the original.
28/365: Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933) (YouTube, Amazon Prime, Vudu)
This preeminent Marx Brothers comedy — their most concentrated, fluent and beautifully timed comedy, which might just make it the greatest comedy of all time — is too much carefree fun for one 68-minute movie; it’s like a bulldozing megadose of happiness, all but irresistible. Famously, the formidable orthodoxy-wreckage firm of Groucho, Harpo, Chico and (even) Zeppo savagely satirize world politics, war, ruling-class pomposity and ritual, but there’s something else at work with the Marxes at the peak of their form — an essential hedonism, and a life-loving respect for impulse, whim, mockery and anarchy. Perhaps cinema’s purest and most enduring antidote to depression — as Woody Allen opined in Hannah and Her Sisters, positing a random viewing of this movie as the cleansing answer to the protagonist’s suicidal malaise.
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3
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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