Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 42
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
288/365: Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966) (Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play)
A paranoid-Johnson-era companion piece to the Dealey Plaza prophecy of Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, this New Wave masterwork has the gritty chill of a bad dream endured face down in your pillow. Science fiction with an scratchy strait-jacket on, post-noir with a junkie’s nervous twitch, Seconds presents a bureaucratic nightmare that’s as Kafkaesque as it is ruthlessly capitalistic. Menopausal bank executive John Randolph, haunted by mystery men following him through Grand Central, by the phone call he got the night before from a dead friend, and by his own affluent but empty existence, is seduced by a secret corporation to scrap his old life and physical identity for this year’s model. His death is faked, his signature altered, and his face remodeled into Rock Hudson’s. He begins life anew as a swinging Malibu bachelor — but the lost man’s naive odyssey is doomed, and as the constrictions of being a “second” tighten around him, he quickly makes a shambles out of this life, too, and returns to Company headquarters demanding to be recycled again. And once he’s on the assembly line, he can’t get off. Chilling and potent, it may be the most scarifying indictment of corporate service culture ever produced in this country.
289/365: Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play)
Anderson’s rapturously strange second film centers around the unforgettable Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), a 15-year-old genius who can’t be bothered with schoolwork but instead rules over a prep-school kingdom of extracurricular activity (yearbook, chess club, fencing team, play director, debate team), brooking no challenge to his hilariously over-cultured supremacy until he decides to woo the new kindergarten teacher (Olivia Williams), an outrageous project that includes raising outside funds for a school aquarium (from Bill Murray’s miserable, self-destructive school benefactor), and of course things get complicated. Anderson’s distinctly dry and absurd sensibility comes into focus here; the film’s comedy is so subtle and organic you could miss it if you’re not leaning in. In fact, scene for scene the story has the loopy, unreasonable feel of life zooming right by you. We’re never told how to judge any of the characters; however whimsical, they carry the possibilities of real people, and, Murray, as the sad-sack ‘Nam vet whose moneyed suburban hell makes him cannonball into his pool and float underwater for peace, is flat-out great.
290/365: Sometimes a Great Notion (Paul Newman, 1971) (YouTube)
Paul Newman’s adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel about an Oregon logging family is quintessential American New Wave-ness — immersed in a dead-real subculture, shot on location and with real light, attentive to how people and family members actually treat each other, and skeptical about the empty promises of the American Dream. Newman stars as the family’s bull goose, Henry Fonda is the ornery, aging patriarch (in a huge cast, a constant reminder of the industry’s dangers), Lee Remick is the discontented wife on the edge of flying, and Michael Sarrazin is the prodigal-hippie brother returning home and confronting the array of hard-ass reasons he left to begin with. Richard Jaeckel, as the jovial middle brother, steals the movie (to the tune of an Oscar nom), in one of the decade’s most gripping set pieces, quite naturally tumbling out of the all-too-genuine action of entering into old growth forests and taking the trees down.
291/365: Seaside (Julie Lopes-Curval, 2002) (YouTube)
A tapestry-film comprised of unanswerable questions, briefly glimpsed lives and a naturalist’s sense of place, this French film rolls like a beachcombing daydream — it’s devoid of any dictatorial point-of-view or overtly dramatic structure. Quartered into seasonal sections and set entirely in a tiny, fading beach community dependent upon a local quarry that digs and sorts decorative rocks, the movie wanders between more than a dozen locals and vacationers, catching snippets of their behavior and inner tensions. A young assembly-line stone sorter (Helene Fillieres) seems dissatisfied with everything, including her aging lifeguard boyfriend (Jonathan Zaccai), whose lonely mother (Bulle Ogier) has blown her retirement savings in the town’s small casino. Scores of other characters come and go — including a fashion photographer, his blissfully dim girlfriend and his lovely, increasing anxious mother (Ludmila Mikael) — but we see them only in random cross-sections. The changing of the seasons leaves some of the town’s inhabitants gone, some pregnant, some resolved to shoulder their burdens. It’s a gently sensible strategy that dares to suggest, as Renoir, Ozu, Rohmer and Kiarostami films do, that you can only know so much about other people by watching them, and that our small “knowing” says as much about us as it does about the subjects of our attention. In the end it’s about a place and some people — as if we were vacationing ourselves, and the other inhabitants were merely passing us on the boardwalks.
292/365: The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939) (Criterion Channel, Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Google Play)
The lost third man of classical Japanese cinema — betwixt Akira Kurosawa’s Americanized pulpitude and Yasujiro Ozu’s breath-stealing stillness — Kenji Mizoguchi has long been a more difficult master magician to love and a harder legend to sell. In this early film, you can see the man’s style walk in the footsteps of Murnau, mobilizing the corridor of a scene’s visual geography as a way to manifest a character’s dramatic life and to watch it from a sympathetic distance in the same instant. The laziest eye can see how Mizoguchi’s pensive-yet-restless, heat-seeking visual strategy embodies his stories’ emotional tragedies, and vice-versa. Set in the late 1800s but almost entire confined to studio sets often lit with sulfurous mist, the movie centers on a famed Kabuki troupe, the colorless, spoiled, and rather effeminate scion of which, Kiku (Shotaro Hanayagi), is lauded for his in-drag performances to his face, but mocked as a mediocrity behind his back. Only Toku (Kakuko Mori), a self-sacrificing wet nurse to his baby brother, tells him the truth, however kindly; immediately, she’s the only person on Earth he can trust. They dally, and as the troupe family cannot have an inter-class marriage, she is summarily fired. Kiku stubbornly hunts her down (in roving shots that make off-screen spaces pop), and they become outcasts together, eventually leading to a turnabout where, because Mizoguchi is all about the tragedy of sexist inequity, doom befalls only Toku. What amounts to an early talkie in Japan, Mizoguchi’s film doesn’t indulge in close-ups, favoring long tracking shots (some five minutes or more), giving us a macro view of the quiet war between love and society, and like all of Mizoguchi, it indicts the persistent norms that reduce even headstrong women to sex slavery and short lives.
293/365: A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (Woody Allen, 1982) (Vudu, YouTube, Google Play)
It’s possible that no American movie has been as besotted with the sensual realities of summertime as this overlooked and in fact infinitely repeatable Woody Allen comedy, in which, saluting both Shakesperare and Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, three early-century couples gather in a to-die-for Victorian house in the country for a balmy weekend, and endure various mate-swapping peccadilloes. Light on its feet, soundtracked by Felix Mendelssohn, and blessed with the effervescence of Mary Steenburgen and Julie Hagerty, Allen’s movie goes for broke in terms of seasonal glamour: sunlit meadows, firefly swarms, moonlit brooks, rendezvous in the night forest, dining al fresco, daydreaming in cotton dresses, suspenders and straw hats, all of it shot with Vermeerian sublimity by Gordon Willis.
294/365: The Tribe (Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy, 2014) (Tubi, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Vudu)
A strange coup de cinema no one saw coming — a Ukrainian drama entirely about deaf teenagers, their life of signage presented without subtitles. It’s essentially a silent film, an experience of eruptive human narrative structured by language the vast majority of of its audience will not understand. (The American Sign Language literate will only comprehend a fraction of the Ukrainian system.) As for the rest of us, we are pure observers, just as we are in real life — leaning in, not omnipotent, alert to mysterious human behavior. Of course, even absent the convenience of direct linguistic communication, you understand what’s happening all too well. Taking place largely within the walls of a dilapidated boarding school for the deaf, the film is a harrowing portrait of social collapse and hierarchical abuse, writ in miniature. We follow one lad, Sergey (Grygoriy Fesenko), as he arrives as a newbie; in a series of long, roving, observational shots that take up to six minutes each (there are 34 of them in the whole film), Sergey attempts to fit into the school’s bully-code social order, getting quickly robbed, slapped around, intimidated, and kicked out of his dorm bed. No pushover, he fights back, and life quickly turns criminal, desperate and homicidal. To a startling degree, the film rejiggers the act of watching cinema. Language itself is the issue under question — how helpless are we without it? The affect of Slaboshpytskiy’s strategy, including his long takes that do not emphasize anything for us (no close-ups), is to disrupt our natural craving for narrative omnipotence. In a traditional silent film, we know we will be told what is essential; the absence of language was something the medium worked around, often poetically. (And often not, with title cards.) But here we know no such thing — we are on the edge of crisis at all times, trying to fathom the action as it spirals out of control. For the first time in movies, we witness the expression of wild psychodramatic emotion in utter quiet, with only a few grunts and the rustle of fast-moving hands to fill the rooms.
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, 39, 40, 41
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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