Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 10
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
64/365: Pistol Opera (Seijun Suzuki, 2001) (Tubi, Amazon Prime)
Iconic troublemaker Suzuki was 78 when this movie began sprouting up at 2001 film festivals, and in virtually every way it’s the work of a cantankerous, self-pleasing coot, dismissing narrative conveniences in favor of gumball-colored vogue-noir, goofy digressions, bulldozing sight gaggery and an inexhaustible tank of style. Whatever plot there is is borrowed piece-meal from Suzuki’s own Branded to Kill (1967), in which various obsessive hitmen jockey for top rankings in some ill-defined guild by offing one another. Branded is unchecked lunacy, and it squelched Suzuki’s exploding career as a New Wavey pulp stylist. Pistol Opera could be seen as the older film’s absurdist-futuristic sequel, as if Jo Shinoda’s battered yesteryear anti-hero had dreamt it in one of his concussed stupors. Here, the competing assassins are almost all willowy women, chatting about the hierarchy’s quarterly results (posted, literally, on a fence) and Sapphically vamping around Butoh sets decorated by Man Ray. After a hippie-dippie paint-box title sequence, it’s every long-barrel-brandishing, enrobed assassinatrix for herself, as Suzuki jump-cuts his film into laconic chaos, mixes mountainous landscapes with color-wheel theater sets, and shovels a ton of blood-red tulip petals with a payloader. Once you get to a shoot-out in an iodine-yellow-misted bamboo forest intersected with laser-sight beams, you know you’re back in Suzuki-land.
65/365: A Generation (Andrzej Wajda, 1954) (EasternEuropeanMovies.com, Criterion Channel, Kanopy)
The leading figure of the Polish “new wave” that came between, chronologically and aesthetically, the Italian neo-realists and the French New Wave, Wajda has always made films like a battlefield doctor takes pulses, and this, his first film, is fluid, powerful and prickly, set during the Nazi occupation but trained in on high-school-age punk Stach (Tadeusz Lomnicki), who quickly defects from his delinquency stage after a friend is shot by Germans. Apolitical and snotty, Stach apprentices in a woodshop, only to find the place seething with black marketeering and Resistance skullduggery, all of which is of little interest to him until he’s confronted with sky-eyed, apple-cheeked Dorota (Urszula Modrzynska), a beaming proselytizer for Communism and a lieutenant in the insurrectionary underground. The absurd equation here, linking the injustice of capitalism with the Nazi occupation itself, is as subtly gestured as a student’s revolted squirm under the “kindly” grasp of a sermonizing priest. There’s a good deal more — Wajda’s narrative is thick with reverb and busy-ness, filled with animals and underground passages and disarming compositions (plus Roman Polanski in a prominent role as an upstart Resistance fighter), and dense with fascinating faces and subplots. One image among many crystallizes Wajda’s ironic thrust — Stach and Dorota are introduced to each other in front of a church by a Communist friend, and in order to blend in, they hook arms as a couple and watch as a bridal procession passes inches in front of them — watching, in effect, the happy, normal life they’ll never enjoy walk right by and disappear. Their fiery naivete seems blunted in that moment, and though it’s clear they don’t quite understand what they’re witnessing and what they’re sacrificing, we do, just as Europeans in the mid-‘50s certainly did.
66/365: Turn Me On, Dammit! (Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, 2011) (DailyMotion, iTunes)
Censored in Alabama for its English-translation title alone, this buoyant, zesty Norwegian anthem-film opens mid-masturbation — with the dog watching. Our nearly-16 heroine, Alma (instant star Helene Bergsholm), is a drop-dead gorgeous blond willow twig with lazy cat eyes, a sly smile and killer incisors, whose only problem in the world is everything, beginning with unquenchable horniness. Her hyperactive fantasy life fills the movie with rapturous (but never fantastical) sexual scenarios, when she’s not calling phone sex services and squirming on coin rolls. Life in her nowhere town (where you have to walk or bus up long mountain roads to get anywhere) relegates Alma and her friends to dead end chitchat, beer and hash cigars, until the inarticulate boy Alma jerks off about literally pokes her with his uncircumcized johnson and precipitates a silent scandal. Respectful of its characters and never straining for a laugh, Jacobsen’s movie serenely limns a world all its own, and its affection for teenage sexual folly is contagious. (It helps that Bergsholm’s limpid presence is its own kind of new drug.) Easily the most lovable of the recent rash of Norwegian imports, it’s smart and short and sweet as can be.
67/365: The Clowns (Federico Fellini, 1970) (Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
This Italian TV project was never top shelf Fellini during the filmmaker’s barnstorming heyday, but today it’s more interesting, more ambivalent and mysterious, than most of Fellini’s once-celebrated blockbusters, perhaps despite his intentions, as it dives into the filmmaker’s lifelong-but-uninterrogated interest in the “half magic, half slaughterhouse” paradigm of the circus. It’s ostensibly a documentary, but of course it’s not, coming off more like a fiction about a film crew with a famous maestro trying to make a film about the dying art of clowning, and failing due to the subject’s own ephemeral absurdity. The Godardisms are thick on the ground: a female assistant is commanded occasionally to read historical exposition directly at the camera and is frequently interrupted by bustle; all of the interviews are clearly orchestrated and intercut with trad historical scenes; crew members are routinely glimpsed (even the boom man gets a glass of wine during a toast, in his own cutaway). All of which serves to tap-dance lightly around the film’s central conundrum: the lost phenomenon of the clowns themselves, old and retired or middle-aged and still defiantly performing, here for Fellini in a fake big top in which the audience beyond the third row are, spookily, cardboard cutouts. The film’s very subject is a decidedly arthritic, antiquated form of peasant performance, and Fellini heaps it on, questioning the nature of the beast with an unblinking camera. What are these strange men, painted like primitives and dressed like parade horses, cavorting and brawling like spastic toddlers in the sawdust? There’s little laughter in Fellini’s film, and at least one terrified child, the film’s narrational voice tell us, brought home and beaten by his mother. It’s a chilling, funereal film, suggesting the clowns as pathetic repositories for our cruelest enjoyments, and that their acts were therein closer to car wrecks and public hangings than to comedy per se. In the genuinely nightmarish, climactic big-top performance, which is in more than one way a eulogy, there’s no audience at all, just the darkness of empty seats, and the aging clowns scramble through their bizarre rites like mutants in a post-apocalyptic hinterland, expressing themselves the only way they can, with absurd, repetitive gestures that used to have some vaguely remembered meaning, but now clearly have none.
68/365: Sweetie (Jane Campion, 1989) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy, HBO Max, Amazon Prime)
Across the rambunctiously populated indie film landscape of the late 1980s, it was virtually impossible to ignore Campion’s debut, a film designed to befuddle and bedazzle every complacent eyeball. It was also an Australian/New Zealand debut-shot heard round the world, and a vividly committed cataract of feminist filmmaking — we knew right then and there that Campion, whose turf has remained the rebelliously unpredictable psychosexual will of womanhood, was not going anywhere. It’s a surreal family satire conceived and executed as though it’s a nasty dream you’re having after pigging out all night on Twizzlers, moonshine and mescaline. We begin with Kay (Karen Colston), a dowdy mega-nerdess with a phobic dread of trees and a catatonic social affect that just screams of a horrific upbringing and family life. But her parents — hilarious, helpless sub-bourgeois Aussie caricatures Flo (Dorothy Barry ) and Gordon (Jon Darling) — are self-delusional codependent idiots, are hardly malevolent — the real problem lurking behind the textural and behavioral weirdness is Sweetie (Genevieve Lemon), the family’s crucible, a shrill, preening, obese sociopath-cum-would-be-actress stuck in her spoiled, show-off preadolescence, and committed to inter-sibling combat as if she and Kay were still battling over toys and their parents’ affections, limning a sisterly relationship that bordered on the hellish and twisted both women on the insides for good. The delivery system for this wrenching dynamic is Aussie-stylized through the ceiling: Campion and cinematographer Sally Bongers have crafted an unforgettable visual assault, crafting the shanty-suburbia of southeastern Australia in outrageous puppet-show tableaux, cheesy pastel colors, arch proto-punk posturing, cartoon-impossible compositions, bird’s-eye-view perspectives, lens-distorted grotesqueries, animated interpolations, absurdist locations, deliberately disturbing fragmentations, and so on, a punk-era palette that Campion knowingly exploits, even as she converts it into something much less postured and far more psychological.
69/365: The Arbor (Clio Barnard, 2010) (Amazon Prime, Artangel)
The clear winner of any Best Acting in a Documentary Award you’d care to offer, Barnard’s weird and unsettling meta-film takes as its crucible the cascade of domestic disaster revolving around Andrea Dunbar, a boozy Yorkshire lass who had three children with three men and also, starting as a teen, wrote scabrous plays routinely produced at the Royal Court Theatre, including the popular farce Rita, Sue and Bob, Too. Reaching back via Dunbar’s plays into her parents’ combative lives, past the scarfaced writer’s 1990 drunken death at 29 and forward into the heroin-crack-&-infanticide tribulation of her eldest daughter Lorraine, the movie began as audio interviews with the survivors. But then Barnard has each persona enacted and lip-synched by a cast of actors, creating a kind of ongoing fugue between confession, theatricalism, “acting” and movie-ness that is unique, troublesome (you watch the lips carefully, and marvel at the achievement), and finally mysterious. By itself the Dunbar saga provides enough horrifying narrative juice for a few Zola novels, and Barnard makes no bones about the squalor and abuse of the eponymous “estate” the clan lives on still, staging scenes from Dunbar’s first autobiographical play on the town green, surrounded by onlookers and decaying apartment blocks.
70/365: Variety (Bette Gordon, 1983) (Criterion Channel, YouTube, SundanceNow, Amazon Prime)
One of the pioneering wagon-train movies of the inaugural, New York-based Independent Film movement, Gordon’s film comes off in retrospect as a veritable time capsule of post-punk downtown coolness. Just read the credits: screenwriter Kathy Acker (experimental novelist), star/photog Nan Goldin (famed shutterbug), soundtrack composer John Lurie (of Jarmusch movies and The Lounge Lizards), cinematographer Tom DiCillo (director of “Living in Oblivion,” etc.), producer Renee Shafransky (Spalding Gray’s longtime girlfriend), co-star Luiz Guzman, bit players Spalding Gray and Cookie Mueller (veteran of John Waters’s universe), production assistant Christine Vachon, and so on. The grungy vibe is itself a window on the past — only at the nascent launch of a DIY indie wave in the post-‘60s period could you, or would you, set an interrogatory neo-feminist psychodrama like this in a Times Square grindhouse devoted exclusively to cheap Euro-porn. Gordon’s heroine is Christine (Sandy McLeod), an unassuming out-of-town girl who takes the joint’s ticket-seller job out of desperation. Of course, she begins to brush up, sometimes literally, with the men that used to attend those theaters, becoming vulnerable to deranged masturbatory phone calls and even falling tentatively into the orbit of a wealthy middle-aged mystery man. She tries to maintain her relationship with a reporter (Will Patton), but the more she talks about the moviehouse and its clients, the more he is repulsed. Acker and Gordon’s simple masterstroke here is to make Christine hard to nail down — she’s good-natured but not sweet, attitude-free but not naive, more curious than shockable, and not overtly political in any way, leading her to begin exploring the possibility of being a sexual object. Smart and strangely, even beguilingly off-putting, the movie’s also pretty depressing; the lack of proactive energy on Christine’s part is both the film’s overriding message and the source of its hopelessness. But historically it speaks volumes: this is one of the first American films with a true feminist docket and an unalloyed female perspective, in a Reagan-era New York of lingering Forty Deuce smut and all-night luncheon counters and open cultural warfare between the old-guard desires of men and the newfound sexual self-definitions of women.
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
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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