Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 1
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
1/365: Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000) (The Criterion Channel, YouTube)
Bearing the emotional complexity and depth of a great novel, Yang’s last film (the title translates as “one-one” in Mandarin, or “one by one”) trains its wise gaze upon a Taiwanese family’s often unexamined middle years — when children seem to be nothing but trouble, aging parents begin to die, jobs get outmoded, and lost opportunities begin to seriously haunt. The Jians consist of middle-aged software executive NJ (Wu Nienjien), his troubled wife Min-Min (Elaine Jin), their teenage daughter Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee) and seven-year-old son Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang); we first meet them at the shotgun wedding of Min-Min’s brother (Chen Xisheng), who’s partners in business with NJ, and who’s plagued by his embittered ex-fiancee (Zeng Xinyi). The clan is immediately thrown into a state of crisis when the ex-fiancee explodes at the wedding and Min-Min’s elderly mother (Tang Ruyun) subsequently passes into a coma. As the family attempts to nurse her by talking at her bedside, each in his or her own way, NJ’s life becomes a litany of dissolving/restructuring chaos: his business is failing, his wife suffers a mid-life crisis and retreats to a mountain temple, and he stumbles into Sherry (Ke Suyun), an old sweetheart who has since married an American insurance broker and who pines as NJ does for their perished first love. There are other plot threads, and at least a dozen main characters, and so no synopsis could do justice to the film’s naturalistic textures, heartbreaking moments and affecting rhythms; at nearly three hours long, it’s a five-course meal of a movie, with drinks, for mature moviegoers.
2/365: The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Peter Yates, 1973) (DailyMotion, The Criterion Channel, YouTube)
One of the American New Wave’s long-forgotten anthems, Yate’s low-rent, low-key, post-French Connection neo-noir doesn’t reach out to throttle the viewer with Method or style or action; Yates is no Lumet or Friedkin, and novelist George V. Higgins’s story is pared down to a tightening bad-luck web of circumstance that’s communicated almost entirely through mano-a-mano huddle-talk, sometimes so coded and oblique you’re not sure what’s being actually said. Robert Mitchum, hulking around with a worn-out suitcase under each eye, is the eponymous Coyle, a petty Boston crook trying on one hand to go straight and on the other to possibly give up one of his friends to the law so he won’t have to do time on a rap waiting for him in New Hampshire. His friends, so to speak, are not to be trusted, from Peter Boyle’s bartender-snitch-assassin to Alex Rocco’s bank robber, Steven Keats’s modish gunrunner, and Richard Jordan’s superslick fed agent. The irony of the title grows like a fungus: we become increasingly aware even as Coyle does not that he’s all alone, and everyone will maneuver to use him somehow, and never get him the little he needs. The film is one covert, frustrated meeting in a dank urban corner after another, and Yates shoots it with unobtrusive grace. It’s a tragedy we don’t know is a tragedy until we see gears start to lock, and then it’s plain that poor Coyle never stood a chance.
3/365: The Flavor of Green Tea of Rice (Yasujiro Ozu, 1952) (The Criterion Channel, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Well into the master’s postwar golden age, which lasted only 15 years and exactly 15 films, this often overlooked Ozu shoshimin-eiga explores the paradigmatic generational divide the director was so interested in, but in the service — via a rather typically precise, almost Chekhovian screenplay, co-written as always with Kogo Noda — of autopsying a traditional marriage, fraying silently in the conflict between omiai (“arranged” marriage) and modern sensibilities. Keiko Tsushima is the errant niece who rebels against the matchmaking, a dilemma confronted mostly by her aunt and uncle (Michiyo Kogure and Shin Saburi), whose own childless arranged union is marked by spite, bullying and avoidance. In a rich and organic weft of supporting voices and perspectives, the primary dramatic crisis comes down to weighty silences and suddenly empty rooms — always Ozu’s most resonant visual flourish — but tied into the gender war are eloquent critiques of Japanese bourgeois (even the marriage in question boils down to class difference) and of the modern era’s loss of respect and meaning. Of course Ozu leavens the dynamic with ambivalence and understanding and gray regions of doubt, and if the ending reaches an awkward state of happy/sad we may feel within our rights to doubt, the master’s steady gaze alone can absolve us from cynicism.
4/365: The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992) (The Criterion Channel)
The final chapter in British auteur Davie’s languorous, masterful autobiographical film cycle, this rapturously-made movie follows Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), which focuses on his older siblings and the tyrannical psychobeast father that wrecked their lives and succumbed to stomach cancer when Davies was 7, in the late ’40s. This relaxing film is a return to the childhood years of freedom and peace that followed, up to and including Davies’ torturous entry, as a boy increasingly aware of his gayness, into secondary school at age 11. Drunk on remembered details, the film can happily stop dead in its hovering course to simply observe the central family’s mum (Marjorie Yates) fuss with laundry and sing “If You Were the Only Girl in the World,” but also ascends, as in the breakout money sequence, scored to Debbie Reynolds crooning “Tammy”: a sum-it-all-up, pure-cinema overhead pan of the young lad playing by his house, dissolving into overhead social portraits of the respective congregations of church, school and the movies, in an angelic sky-angle survey of life. It’s heartfelt, but it’s also archaeological.
5/365: Mother and Son (Alexander Sokurov, 1997) (SovietMoviesOnline)
An astonishing artpiece quite unlike any film you’ve ever seen before, Sokurov’s movie is a pioneering act of analogue visualization. In the tradition of Andrei Tarkovsky and Theo Angelopoulos, Sokurov is a master manufacturer of filmic space, and a grand believer in”transcendent” film style, and so his story is so simple it could barely sustain a poem: somewhere in a remote cabin, a grown son (Alexei Ananishnov) cares for his dying mother (Gudrun Geyer) much as a mother would nurse a sick child. The film’s “action” is comprised simply of his acts of kindness, the demonstrations of deep affection the two exchange, and the passing of a single day, from morning light to twilight. At one point, the mother asks to get out of the house, and so the son carries her, through a deserted village nearby, and through the landscape, which, as Sokurov photographs it, is the film’s third protagonist. It’s as if Sokurov reinvented the earth — the hills, fields, mountains, forests and stormy skies we see possess a vivid, eye-popping strangeness, achieved by shooting through various types of handpainted mirrors and warping lenses, so that his elongated characters seem as if they’re about to tumble off the edge of a new planet, one with different physical laws. Sokurov never uses his distorted imagery (inspired, he says from painter Caspar David Freidrich) for effect alone — it creates a disorientating, melancholy context for the characters’ central drama, of the inescapable-ness and acceptance of death.
6/365: Araya (Margot Benacerraf, 1959) (Amazon Prime)
Unearthed and restored in 2009 from the bowels of neglected film history, Benacerraf’s film has long been one of those titles you happen upon only in the annals of major film festival awards (it shared the International Critics Prize at Cannes with Hiroshima, Mon Amour). A piece of swoony anthro-cinema, the movie chronicles the lives of the salt workers on the titular Venezuelan peninsula, an arid wasteland where salt-reaping and -collecting is the only native industry, worked at by exploited peasants around the clock. Benacerraf may have had progressive-social purposes behind her demi-documentary (everything about it is staged for the camera, in the tradition of Robert Flaherty, whose films Araya closely models), but most of the film’s energy is visual. The landscape itself is hardly something a smart filmmaker could pass up: a deserty tropical paradise pocked by poverty and, best of all, lorded over by monstrous, three-story high snow-white trapezoidal pyramids of salt, the workers tending and adding to them like termites on a mound. Benacerraf, an industry legend in her native country and an arthouse hobnobber in the middle century, knew that the surreal, abstracted forms were what mattered, and her DP Giuseppe Nisolli (who has no other credit on imdb.com) captures this alien no man’s land with a silvery beauty that rivals Sergei Urusevsky’s work with Mikhail Kalatozov, minus the infra-red.
7/365: Listen Up Philip (Alex Ross Perry, 2014) (Tubi, Amazon Prime, Topic)
Indie wonder Perry’s film is a pocket-sized portrait of nascent literary solipsism gone almost irredeemably toxic. Devising the character of Philip Lewis Friedman (Jason Schwartzman), Perry has indexed the living legend of novelist Philip Roth, and in a particularly interesting way — imaging, in a sense, how Roth’s famously egomaniacal, womanizing, bulldozing personality would fare in the 21th century, when writing slim, sophisticated, self-referential novels could no longer dependably buy you mainstream ubiquity, a nation of fans, and a house in the Hamptons. Unblinking, machine-gun-mouthed, and catastrophically self-excusing, Philip is a monster, expecting his new book to confirm his greatness to the world, and everyone gets the quick-tongued jerk’s self-aggrandizing vitriol sprayed in their face like clown seltzer, from his sweet and therefore doomed girlfriend Ashley (Elizabeth Moss), to his few remaining friends (a confrontational bar meeting with an old classmates reduces the man to tears), and even his long-suffering agent (Daniel London), who balks when Philip decides whimsically that he won’t help publicize his own book, and begins a meeting with Philip by telling his assistant, “Don’t hold my calls.” Philip’s respect is reserved only for Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), an old-guard lit giant roughly rhyming with Roth himself, and it’s a rich conceit — two Philips, suggesting a prismatic view of poisonous ego plus or minus the fermentation of time. Full of malted aphorisms and grizzled advice, Pryce’s courtly king is just as narcissistic as Philip, a fact we only come to see gradually, as we become aware of his ruinous history of marriages and fatherhood. Shot with hand-held looseness that often verges on attention-deficit, and structured with a heavy-hand narration that could be, perhaps, the text of a Philip book-to-be, Perry’s film then detours in its second half toward Ashley’s tear-stained recovery from Philip-ness, Zimmerman’s crumbling relationship with his suspicious grown daughter (Krysten Ritter), and Philip’s own unhappy experiment trying to earn a living as a creative writing workshop teacher. Unorthodox and daring toward discomfiture, the film lays into an entire American subculture, with Schwartzman as its primary weapon.
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, 50, 51, 52
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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