Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 2, Week 6
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
36/365: The Soft Skin (Francois Truffaut, 1964) (Amazon Prime, iTunes)
Francois Truffaut, the French New Wave’s most popular voice, was always torn between polar-opposite film-geek fascinations: the humanistic warmth of Jean Renoir and the coldblooded engineering of Alfred Hitchcock. This seething, icily analytic film, Truffaut’s fourth feature, is a deft fugue-commingling of the two ambitions, as a jetsetting middle-aged celebrity writer (Jean Desailly) begins an affair with a stewardess (Catherine Deneuve’s ill-fated sister Francoise Dorleac) and struggles to maintain a double life. The heartbroken domestic madness comes in a special package: with almost Aronofskiian action editing and a rather Hitch-like attention to clocks, meters, phone calls and the agony of social obligations while something *else* is happening off-screen, Truffaut turns a deliberately ordinary tale of infidelity into an insidious tale of suspense. *Things* are always getting in the way of the illicit couple’s stolen moments, and eventually, of course, the wife (Nelly Benedetti) sniffs trouble, delivers the wickedest divorce bomb ever (“Get a lawyer, I don’t intend to be alone long.”), and unclosets the hunting rifle. Framing a mundane litany of betrayals like an espionage thriller, Truffaut gives the paradigm’s emotional damage concrete form, and studies the sweaty fallout like a microbiologist examining a virus.
37/365: The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967) (Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Vudu)
A generational touchstone more than just a movie, this American New Wave classic is funny about lostness, anomie and social incompleteness as only movies made in the late-60s-early-70s can be. Dustin Hoffman became a star overnight in the unlikeliest of circumstances: as an aimless college grad who cannot get a fix on what he wants out of life, as he is seduced by his parents’ friend’s wife (Anne Bancroft), and is then pressured into dating her daughter (Katherine Ross); as life gets more complicated, he searches madly for any reason at all to choose one destiny over another. All to fresh Simon & Garfunkel songs. Some credit is due to 1967 audiences, who saw themselves in this ambivalent portrait, and dared to ask big questions of themselves and their movies — imagine if you can what our culture would be like if the new millennium’s freshly graduated degree-holders were given the same choice.
38/365: Dark Star (John Carpenter, 1974) (Dailymotion)
In ‘Nam era, science fiction was all about ideas, insane, disquieting, metaphoric ideas about the present, expressed as seething badtime stories about the dreaded days to come. The genre’s bitter-farcical potential has rarely been exploited as ingeniously as in this low-budge post-hippie squib that was expanded, like Lucas’s THX 1138, from a short they’d made at USC. Written and starring Dan O’Bannon (one of the creators of the Alien franchise), and beautifully built, literally, out of styrofoam packing, car models and ice cube trays, the film visits upon a gaggle of astronauts stuck on a useless space mission for years and going insane, accompanied by a beach-ball alien they must constantly corral and an arsenal of planet-destroying bombs that are sentient, tetchy and need to be persuaded not to self-destruct. Wittier and subtler to an order of magnitude than anything Carpenter’s done since, the movie serves as a laughing-gas remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s thorax, echoing its lonely-tech-future vibe but seeing clearly the ghastly yocks of it in a way Kubrick only did with his anti-gravity toilet instructions. Clearly, O’Bannon recycled strands of this for the dead-serious Alien, but Dark Star remains a miraculous demonstration of what can happen with a truly piquant battery of barbed concepts and little else.
39/365: The Imposters (Stanley Tucci, 1998) (YouTube, Vudu, Amazon Prime)
Since Monkey Business, the luxury-ship-stowaway comedy has been more or less in remission, and so Tucci, writing and directing and starring, goes retro here and concocts this slab of giddy, old-fashioned vaudeville, about two lousy thespians (Tucci and Oliver Platt), accidentally aboard among European anarchists, spies, grieving ex-royalty, a pompous theater star (Alfred Molina), a suicidal nightclub singer named Happy Franks (Steve Buscemi, brilliantly), and sundry other broadly played types (including a Nazi-esque ship officer triumphantly personified by Campbell Scott). One of those movies that could siphon darkness off of a clinical depression, it’s so unpretentious and dizzy the entire cast conga-lines right off the set at the end to boppin’ tango music.
40/365: Compulsion (Richard Fleischer, 1959) (Amazon Prime)
The infamous flapper-age Leopold and Loeb murder case — in which two gay, Jewish, intellectual teen psychopaths, exiled from mainstream America in three different ways, killed a kid simply to prove they could get away with it, and didn’t — has been filmed very differently three times, with the homosexuality obliquely suggested in Alfred Hitchcock’s room-confined Rope (1948), and portrayed overtly in Tom Kalin’s meta-nostalgic Swoon (1992). In between, this noir-ish, Hitchcockian psychodrama goes all out with the psychology, with the characters’ hidden sexual drives bubbling right below the surface. Dean Stockwell and (iffily) Bradford Dillman are the boys, E.G. Marshall hits another home run as the D.A., and Orson Welles consumes the third act as a version of super-lawyer Clarence Darrow, with a trial closing statement speech that could still change your feelings about capital punishment.
41/365: Agony (Elem Klimov, 1981) (Vudu)
The Brad and Angelina of post-Kruschev-thaw Soviet moviemaking, Elem Klimov and Larisa Shepitko were a gorgeous married couple of uncompromising artists made even more glam by their thorny run-ins with the censorship bureau and, most of all, by Shepitko’s tragic 1979 death in a car wreck. Klimov’s terminal film, Come and See, will never go out of print, and remains a standing affront to all American depictions of war, while Shepitko’s best features have been beautifully Criterionized. This film, made in 1975 but closeted by the Soviets until 1981, is less known and rarely seen, a seething, hair-pulling account of the last year or so in the life of Rasputin, as revolution brews across Russia and the Romanovs melt down. Orchestrated, acted and post-dubbed with the frantic brio of a 1960s Italian horror movie, the film dared to sympathize with the ineffectual Czar (hence the censorship) as well as with Rasputin himself, who’s an unpredictable admixture of savvy politico and delusionary extrovert, but is also the story’s hapless victim. Still, the movie’s canvas is vast, its attention to history fanatical (everyone’s name and position gets a subtitle, even the 400+ bureaucrats of the Duma), its survey of the madness of power unflinching, if sometimes inscrutable and so close to Zulawski-style screaming mimis that you expect the actors’ heads to explode. Alexei Petrenko plays Rasputin as a unblinking, looming whirlwind, and he’s rather unforgettable.
42/365: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014) (Amazon Prime, Vudu, YouTube)
What this acclaimed indie is: an ironic-retro Iranian punk-feminist vampire meta-thriller romance. In the best postmod-punkette tradition, Amirpour’s film borrows and homages all over the place: with no ado, we’re dumped into Bad City, an unspecified Iranian fringe metropolis where vice and squalor run rampant, shot in inky black-&-white. There’s a vicious pimp (Dominic Rains), a bedraggled hooker (Mozhan Marno), an aging junkie (Marshall Manesh), his good-hearted James Dean-ish son (Arash Marandi), and The Girl (Sheila Vand), a bob-haired and big-eyed pixie in a black chador who when she’s not dancing in her poster-covered room is out hunting on the night streets, because she’s a vampire. The story has these satellites orbit each other and randomly collide; blood gets spilled, of course, but Vand’s lonely bloodsucker only preys on men, and can only seem to close the deal on men that deserve it. In the meantime, Marandi’s hero, dealing with the drug debts his wastrel father has racked up, struggles to negotiate adulthood and ends up flirting and romancing obliviously with The Girl — with his fate balancing on exactly how nice he really is. The fascinating thing is, this full-Farsi thing isn’t an Iranian film at all — Amirpour was raised in the US, and the film was shot outside Bakersfield. But it’s “Iran,” and so officially forbidden activities proliferate, lovers touch when no one is looking (except us), and at least this one seemingly defenseless woman can, as the title says, occupy the city at night and turn the table on gender predation. Coolness is the reigning climate, and the iconography — old cars, cassette tapes, desert town industrial ruins — is pure kitsch. Pop obsessions abound, from The Girl’s Madonna poster and disco ball to the rambunctious soundtrack, which is almost 100% Iranian (or Iranian-American) and yet veers from rockabilly to traditional Persian to spaghetti western.
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
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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