Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 50
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
344/365: Tamango (John Berry, 1958) (Amazon Prime)
Movies about the slave trade are rare — and it’s easy to imagine why: the more fastidious and accurate you are about the details, the more appalling and exploitative your film will be. The ’70s creators of Mandingo and Goodbye Uncle Tom, both on Amazon, have felt this whiplash; are they galling atrocities, or historical testaments? Berry, a House of Un-American Activities blacklistee who wiled away the ’50s and ‘6os in European exile, saw a different dynamic in 1958: his French-made film was banned (in the U.S. and in the French colonies) because the authorities feared it would incite rebellion. Well, yeah: the movie takes place entirely on a slave ship, where the African chattel struggles with the benefits and costs of open revolution, against usurious White Man Curd Jurgens (who keeps a slave mistress, in the form of headliner Dorothy Dandridge, whose vivacious presence onboard drives the men more than a little nuts). Tastefully executed (at least compared to the ’70s films), and therefore maybe a little suspect, it’s still an amazing chunk of startling history virtually no one wanted to see (in the year Sidney Poitier was in The Defiant Ones), and very few have thought to look at since.
345/365: Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971) (Netflix by mail, Facets Multimedia by mail, and worth it)
In many ways the ultimate American road movie, Hellman’s long-martyred piece of backroad existentialism is mythic yet as real as highway weeds. Nearly catatonic, James Taylor and Dennis Wilson are, respectively, the Driver and the Mechanic, their life a series of impromptu drag races against local drivers, almost always winning with their custom dragster in a primer-gray ’55 Chevy shell. Warren Oates (whose credit reads “G.T.O.”) is a slumming dude with a hot car he knows nothing about; the cross-country race between the two vehicles that passes for the film’s plot is arrived at so casually you could miss it. Along the way, the wager is neglected and forgotten; just drive, man. Laconic, grittily shot, and totally devoid of visual showboating and campy counter-culture hipness a la Easy Rider, Hellman’s masterpiece is like being thrust into the dusty, dirt-poor midday of American road culture (most of it “found”), surrounded by overgrown flatlands, vanishing points and the angry chortle of car engines. (The cars are listed as cast members.) The druggy rhythms, the elliptical dialogue, the meaningless forward motion — the movie itself is like a long drive to nowhere.
346/365: Delicatessen (Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro, 1991)
Caro and Jeunet’s eye-popping directorial debut is the closest thing to a monstrous, French, live-action, feature-length, hard-R Road Runner cartoon ever made — and that barely covers it. Set entirely in a single boarding house and butcher shop situated in the middle of a darkened industrial wasteland, and focusing on a guileless schmoe in love with the butcher’s daughter (unaware that the butcher sells his fly-by-night tenants as meat), the movie is a crank-addled comic strip of Rube Goldberg stunts, cannibalistic menace, and completely unpredictable visual gaggery. We may have seen this degree of tasteless energy in the punk movies of the ’80s, but none of them were ever this craftily designed and sumptuously shot — it’s like a nightmare you can’t help admire for it’s gratuitous beauty, even as you’re having it. This is where the world noticed master DP Darius Khondj.
347/365: California Dreamin’ (Christian Nemescu, 2007) (Amazon Prime, Chili)
The Romanian New Wave doubtless took a spiritual hit when one of the movement’s most vibrant and commercially orthodox voices,, died in a car wreck in 2006, forever 27, amidst the post-production on his first feature, a trad Eastern European social farce that’s far less chilly than its famous fest-winning contemporaries. A kind of my-sour-little-village picaresque, the story centers on a destitute village in the muddy Carpathian basin during the Kosovo war — the only sign of which in these self-centered lives is a NATO train carrying American Marines and munitions. Naturally, opportunism and corruption keep the train from going any further, and days pass as virtually everyone involved attempts to turn the American presence to their profit. As Nemescu’s title says, America is both the promised land and the object of socioeconomic derision (“Fuck Bill Clinton!” is the crowning moment of defiance), personified by Armand Assante as a hawk-faced, get-it-done US officer faced with the utter recalcitrance and carefree self-service of the Romanian trod-upon. Razvan Vasilescu, the ubiquitous Jack Nicholson of Romanian film, is the beady-eyed catalyst for the chaos, which mixes in striking workers and ass-covering bureaucrats but ultimately focuses on village girls looking for handsome American husbands and a one-way ticket out of Dodge. Climaxing with the carnage of a heartbreaking riot, Nemescu’s epic comedy (a posthumous win at Cannes) leaves virtually nothing out — which is its own irony, because it’s technically an unfinished film, left dangling after its director’s untimely demise. Cynical and grim as the movie is, this is not the grueling Romania of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu or Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days — Nemescu was a satiric entertainer, and the film embraces a broad-stroke sensibility halfway between Harold Ramis and ascetic arthouse.
348/365: M. Butterfly (David Cronenberg, 1993) (YouTube, Amazon Prime)
By the time of Naked Lunch (1991), Cronenberg had evolved into North America’s master adapter, the formally protean filmmaker who could make greatness from books no one else would dare touch, from Crash (1996), Spider (2002), to Cosmopolis (2012). Somewhere in there there’s this theatrical filmization, the only Cronenberg film based on a true story — what a story, rich in double meanings and fractured realities: a French diplomat in 1960s China named Bernard Boursicot was seduced by a male Peking Opera star he believed to be a woman, carried on a years-long affair with him/her (all the while divulging state secrets, which were passed on to the Chinese), and even produced, somehow, a child, and for the length of the relationship the Frenchman never realized he was in love with a man. In Cronenberg’s closed-maze version (though shot on location, the film’s Beijing is made to resemble the Zone from Naked Lunch), Jeremy Irons is the diffident, dreamy bureaucrat, and the crossdressing spy is John Lone, and though they act the devil out of the many dicey scenarios on hand (including the discreet, fully-robed, must-be-anal sex), the casting is both the movie’s ball-&-chain and its wittiest flourish. Lone is the stickiness here: never for a moment is he convincing as a woman (as opposed to, it is said, B.D. Wong on Broadway), even if Cronenberg himself has said he dismissed several authentic drag queens while casting, saying they were too convincing — kinda like Christ’s last temptation, what does the diplomat’s moony ardor and credulity mean if it’s easily fooled, if we all might make the same error? As usual with Cronenberg, there’s a sense of meta-awareness that doesn’t always jump up and say howdy — every one of Lone’s scenes is a defiant essay on otherness, scrambling received notions of femininity, masculinity, Chinese-ness, continental European-ness, even “Orientality,” as Lone’s Japanese man masquerades as a woman singer playing a female Japanese character in an opera written by an Italian man, for a French audience (played by Brits), who mistake him (or see him truly?) as a male Beijing Opera traditionally playing the female parts. Appearances are everything — as the Maoist students demonstrate outside, burning great piles of traditional Chinese dress.
349/365: El Cid (Anthony Mann, 1961) (Vimeo, Netflix, Amazon Prime)
Medieval historicism was a tough sell in Hollywood in the early TV years, but while so many wide-screen epics of the day settled for studio-lot interiors, producer Samuel Bronston and director Anthony Mann went to Spain and gave this monster a sense of Old World veracity. Long the seemingly quixotic favorite of Martin Scorsese and critic David Thomson, and despite its genre-monolithic stiffness and starchy period dialogue, Mann’s film is a muscular, sometimes strangely disturbing historical launch, fashioned by Hollywood’s greatest landscape painter (Mann) into a menacing examination of class struggle and honor-bound tragedy. The portrayal of invading Muslim Moors and the ostensibly Christian Spanish royalty are both equally venal, Charlton Heston does the axiomatic job only certain movie stars can do (riding out, dead but strapped to his horse, along a beach that foretells the climax of Planet of the Apes seven years later), Sophia Loren looks so impossibly beautiful her face seems on the verge of orchid-blooming, and the crowds — all real, all occupying Mann’s ancient Iberian horizons in a tangible way digital hordes cannot — march and rampage. But mostly the movie is an essay on landscape’s colossal indifference to man, as are so many of Mann’s films, an eloquent and impressive perspective with which heroic sagas are rarely blessed.
350/365: The Asthenic Syndrome (Kira Muratova, 1989) (YouTube)
As represented by the unfettered films this late gray panther made in the post-Soviet era, Muratova might have been the world’s most inhospitable filmmaker, demanding (and getting) respect as a living antithesis to the usual introverted subtlety of international art cinema. She was certainly the only director whose work has been commonly described as irritating, abusive and obfuscatory by her own crazed fanbase. This transgressive act of defiance was the last film to be censored in the USSR, for frontal nudity and generallly scary abstruseness — and the censors weren’t mistaken. Muratova’s refusal to entertain or play nice is actually the key to her liberated state of art, manifested here in a dyspeptic odyssey through a squalid and soulless late-Soviet society, beginning with a widowed doctor who transforms her grief into a war with the world, and then, once it’s revealed that the widow’s grim tale is a movie with in a movie, not quite witnessed by a nomadic teacher beset with narcolepsy, who stumbles through the rest of the film in a daze, ending up in an asylum. Surrealist, absurdist, often deliberately off-putting, and at time horrifically moving, the film reeks of danger, like being trapped in an elevator with a psychotic — anything can happen. Even with the erratic and delayed subtitles on the YouTube copy, you know you’re watching a real high-spirited nihilist at work.
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, 48, 49
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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