Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 48
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
330/365: House (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977) (Criterion Channel, Amazon Prime, Bitchute)
An uncanny prophecy of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 a decade later, this exhumed Japanese horror-lark conjoins schoolgirl farce and the cheesiest then-there-were-none haunted house dynamic imaginable, while the painted backdrop skies suggest Teletubbies and the special effects run from solarized-video absurd to cardboard hilarious. The seemingly rum-stumble cast and crew obey no rules — there often seems to be two or three conflicting scores running simultaneously, and inappropriate freeze frames and pointless fades to black are the norm. The story isn’t a story at all — a gaggle of sailor-uniformed schoolgirls (with names like Gorgeous, Prof and Fantasy) head to a weird aunt’s cheap-set house for spring break, and start getting minced up, one by one, into crude superimpositions, perambulating body parts and rivers of blood that looks like cherry Hi-C. At one point a girl gets literally devoured by a grand piano, only to have her five separated fingers return to play a song. There’s a ‘80s-HK sequence choked in blue fog, there’s a kung-fu battle with autonomous firewood, and when things get really hectic Obayashi scribbles “crazy” comic-panel action lines right over the image. This torrential, Troma-style goof (but without Troma’s resources or consistency), prone to cannibalism-inflected dance numbers and abstracted passages that kaleidoscope together severed limbs and giant flowers, has become a culty must-see, especially in areas where cannabis is at least semi-legal.
331/365: Babylon (Franco Rosso, 1980) (Criterion Channel, Amazon Prime)
An effervescent Brit indie made knee-deep in the social upheavals of the Thatcher era — a few years after punk hit, and several years before the resurgence of British films (like Stephen Frears’) exploring then-current society’s roiling racial diversity and socioeconomic inequity. Rosso focuses entirely on London’s Jamaican diaspora, and a young DJ (Brinsley Forde) struggling to cement venues and publicity for his “sound system” (to Jamaicans, a band of DJs, engineers and impresarios dedicated to playing reggae and ska), while battling every day against rampant xenophobia, industry backstabbing, and the National Front. Rosso was mostly a race-issue documentarian, but the textures and ebullient rhythms he lands in this, his first feature, have the unmistakable grace of authenticity to them, making the film both joyful and enraged. Thanks largely to its rich Jamaican patois (now subtitled, in part), the film didn’t get released in the US until 2019, leaving a crucial integer in British film culture out of the conversation for decades.
332/365: Drugstore Cowboy (Gus Van Sant, 1989) (Vudu, Google Play, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Coming first after his little-seen freshman film Mala Noche (1986), this grungy masterwork announced Van Sant’s presence with unique authority, striding through a saturated northwestern fringe world as if we all grew up there: the shabby rented houses and plain-walled motel spaces with curtains drawn, occupied in golden mid-day (when everyone else is working), imbued with the electric fun of being a kid hiding out from the grown-up world and, in this case, tantalized by the prospect of getting high, with the door locked and no worries in sight.The movie’s primary vocabulary is ants-in-the-pants montage, with a smellable fidelity to time and place, and an urgency that gets you right under the sweaty shirts of the jonesing characters (mostly, Matt Dillon and Kelly Lynch), squatting down in a lost highway corner of the country and pursuing in coveted privacy their childish notion of heaven. This was an America we hadn’t seen on film before — although it’s an outlying neighborhood not far from the backroads of Scarecrow (1973), the wintery barrooms of The Last Detail (1973) and the messy blue-collar yards of A Woman Under the Influence (1976). It’s a junkie story, but not just — Van Sant kills in terms of vibe and detail but also with deft character humor (Dillon’s never been better), visual eloquence, and even soundtrack inventiveness (cue the Desmond Dekker and the Aces), arriving at a new, restless, experimental style and perspective, ending up with a new kind of indie simultaneously pitiful and wry, self-knowing and naked, concrete and breezily metaphoric.
333/365: Fantomas (Louis Feuillade, 1913–14) (Archive.org)
The films of Louis Feuillade have long been recognized as more than the quick pulp they were conceived as, even as compared to his contemporary, D.W. Griffith. Feuillade, famously, had a different program that became mover of a secret history of art cinema, reliant on depth and mise-en-scene to “present” the action, which unrolls at its own pace, not the pace dictated by the editing strategies. Famously, too, a Feuillade pace is relaxed while his stories are breathlessly rapid, seething with mysteries that cannot be fully understood, in high contrast to the simplicity and obviousness of Griffith’s melodramas. This was LF’s first major achievement, five sequential crime-mystery-whatzit features connected serial-like end to end, and it’s nearly impossible not to simply get lost in his artificial worlds, thanks almost entirely to their un-Griffith-ness, their primitive-yet-elegant romance with time and space. It’s almost impossible to follow Fantomas in any detail — the pursuit of the arch-villain/thief/master of disguises (Rene Navarre) by the detective Juve (Edmond Breon) and the reporter Fandor (Georges Melchoir) proceeds as rapidly and fulsomely off-screen as it does on, and often the narrative catapults forward beyond us, out of sight, with a continuous cascade of impersonations, doublings, lost identities, masquerades and uncertainties. In the fourth episode, Fantomas vs. Fantomas, Juve masquerades as Fantomas, and at a single costume ball no less than three versions of the menace face off; in the fifth, The False Magistrate, Juve, passing for Fantomas, takes his place in prison — deliberately — by which point, though we are well-informed as to who is taking whose place at any given moment, we’ve long surrendered to a slippery universe where nothing is ever quite as it seems. The warping gets so intense that Juve’s superior, shocked by the detective’s paranoid ability to see through Fantomas’s ruses and to see the villain’s face everywhere (including as Tom Bob, an American detective full of Yankee hubris), concludes that Juve is Fantomas. And vice-versa. Whew.
334/365: Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993) (YouTube)
Jarman, dead in 1994 from AIDS, at the age of 52, was the new queer cinema’s jester prince; he never made a film that doesn’t manifest on the screen as an unpredictably impish riff on serious matters: Art-making, Sex and Death. Always risk-mad, he’s one of the few filmmakers to make (and get released) manifestly narrative-free feature films, including the incendiary Last of England (1988), but this nosethumbing landmark, Jarman’s terminal work, dares the most. Famously, it’s hardly a movie, but a complex narration and soundtrack playing behind (beside? atop?) an empty but bright blue screen. (It takes Godard and Gorin’s Letter to Jane one step further, from one image to none; it’s closest corollary might be a radio play.) Jarman’s text, about the decay of his body and eyesight in the grip of AIDS, and about his closing life already emptied of friends and lovers, is wry and intimate, and its relationship with what you’re seeing — and not seeing — is, to say the least, disquieting. The film is intended to be seen in a darkened theater, where the relentless color amounts to an optical attack, and ends up playing tricks on your eyes; on home screens, the experience is closer to seeing a Caravaggio in a text book: edifying and necessary, no replacement for being there, but an opportunity to consider the concept more than the experience.
335/365: Los Bastardos (Amat Escalante, 2008) (Amazon Prime)
Arriving under the star of Carlos Reygadas (a co-producer), Escalante’s debut is a creepy-crawly art-film bad time, but we don’t really know how bad until the end. Before that the movie is a bolero of uneasiness and dread, and we’re never sure if the marriage between menace and comatosity will ever be consummated. From the very first, super-long shot down the dry bed of the Los Angeles River, to the last close-up in a massive strawberry field, Escalante’s film is a work of gripping concision and malevolent patience. The two protagonists, Jesus and Fausto (non-pros Jesus Moises Rodriguez and Ruben Sosa), are just Mexican illegals looking for work across the street from an LA Home Depot; soon, gears are switched, and suddenly the two men climb through a window and into a suburban house occupied by a miserable white mother (Nina Zavarin), who has replied to her teenage son’s gruff departure by knocking herself out with a hit of crack. No one talks much, but immediately the air is filled with suspended judgments — the woman feeds the Mexicans microwave dinners, and then they all swim in the backyard pool (at gunpoint), then they share some more crack. She is convinced her ex-husband sent them; they don’t understand English and couldn’t much care. We brace ourselves for where the movie’s headed — a single appalling moment that defines finally what the movie has really been about all this time. It’s Zavarin’s wasted middle-aged Mom, hanging on so desperately to a middle-class existence and identity despite the hunger for toxic escape and her implicit run of rotten luck, that sits at the center of the film’s mysteries.
336/365: Voyage to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
In the heyday of ’50s Cahiers du cinema — the law firm of Bazin, Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol et al. — this mid-career melodrama was the most vital film of the middle century, the one that defined modern film. Inescapably it’s a film about the fragility of marriage (star Ingrid Bergman and Rossellini were only married for four years at this point, and wouldn’t last another four), in which a British couple (Bergman and George Sanders) descend on Naples to sell an inherited house. It’s crystal clear from minute one that the couple’s faith in each other is in freefall, and their distractions and dalliances in Italy, together and separate, is only postponing the inevitable. Lean and simple, Rossellini’s film isn’t cluttered with plot, and what isn’t said could fill a phone book. The lost characters spend most of the film turning their anxious attention outward, as tourists and vacationers, and so the film becomes a breath-holding study — an “investigation,” in critic David Thomson’s phrase — of unhappiness on the verge of explosion. Instead, Rossellini takes the “action” to Pompeii, where the pair witness the plaster-casting of two entwined bodies incinerated by lava two thousand years earlier, and metaphor becomes reality. Always interested in the mystery zone between documentary and fiction, even when the “reality” in question was his own marriage, Rossellini shoots his anti-drama with impassive mobility, always maintaining a distance but constantly reframing, insisting that “real” environments impede on the characters’ perspectives. It’s a movie you have to hold onto as it wanders — it will not grab onto you — and so of course at home it was loathed. (Italian critics, wowed by the release of Fellini’s La Strada the same day, called for Rossellini’s retirement.) Laying the brickwork for Antonioni’s existential parables a few years to come, Rossellini’s film is closer to watching actual strangers suffer loneliness despite being together. It can leave an aching bruise, but only if you’re paying attention.
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, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47
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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