Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 12
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
78/365: Alps (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2011) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Occupying a zombified metaphor parkland all his own, Greek enfant Lanthimos follows up his redoubtable family-bell-jar hit Dogtooth with this fabulously rich and elusive mystery, the narrative content of which is so fascinatingly oblique that watching it is like peeling an artichoke you’re not sure is an artichoke at all. A nurse, an EMT, a gymnast and her coach form a strange and secret band of code-named agents pursuing some sort of interpersonal espionage of empathy and impersonation — but knowing any more would destroy the film’s very peculiar slow-striptease structure. Suffice it to say that the symbology at its heart has untold layers, as Lanthimos’ concepts always do; unavoidably, what emerges is a parable of moviemaking and moviewatching itself, as it satisfies our weakest dreams and collects its victims. Lanthimos’s fractured, hyper-focused visual ellipses are in full force, and the probing sense of human mystery at the film’s center has a unique flavor. It’s not as outrageous a work as The Lobster, but it deserves a lot more eyeballs.
79/365: The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy, DailyMotion)
In the midcentury, French movies didn’t come any hairier, nastier, or more robustly existentialist than Clouzot’s primal-scream-therapy pulp. Four men, two trucks, a distant oil fire, a load of sweaty nitro, and a bajillion miles of unpaved South American hellhole roadway. How much money would they have to pay you, or how hopeless would you have to be, to take the job, drive the explosives to the explosion, face the impossible? The scenario, from Georges Arnaud’s 1950 novel, is a loaded cannon, built to bruise, armed with a fresh kind of No Exit action structure that no pulp, not even film noir, had ever come close to before. The thematic payload is split between blackhearted masculine aggro (we never learn why these Europeans, including Yves Montand and Charles Vanel) are stuck in this Third Worldly nowhere, but it’s clear they’d left misery and carrion in their wake) and the tenderly explosive by-product of wholesale corporate greed. Clouzot’s movie was openly defamed as being “anti-American” when it first appeared, a claim that may’ve only helped its box-office bonanza, since nobody, not one ticket-buying soul, could’ve wasted a blink on the depiction of an oil company merrily enlisting men “with no unions, no families, no one will care” to drive themselves to death and save the home office from the expense of an industrial accident. Remade, to a dazzling uptick in effect, by William Friedkin in 1977, as Sorcerer.
80/365: The Day I Became a Woman (Marziyeh Meshkini, 2000) (Vimeo)
The first film from Mrs. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, after her husband began the unsanctioned Makhmalbaf Film House and began “making filmmakers” instead of making films, this startlingly simple and ravishing debut (written and produced by Makhmalbaf) is a linking series of symbolist fables that suggests the lyricism of Vigo, Bunuel and Paradjanov while standing its own primitive ground in the wasteland that is Islamic society for women. Because only feature films need to get approved by the government, Meshkini shot her film as three shorts, and in synopsis, it can sound schematic: the three tales focus on womanhood in crisis, first as a child emerging into the strictures of adult life, second as a grown woman struggling for freedom, and third as an elderly woman facing death. In the first, a young girl begs to have one last hour to play with her friend on the beach before she must wear her first chador and thereafter have no improper contact with boys (she spends much of the time waiting for her friend, standing a stick in the dirt to see its shadow, and her liberty, gradually vanish); the second tale starts out on horseback: a man furiously rides across the desert and intersects with… a huge marathon bicycle race peopled entirely by hundreds of women wrapped in their pitch-black chadors (an unsettling and odd image that never grows ordinary), to find his restless wife racing and divorce her in transit. The last sequence, in which an elderly woman arrives by plane at a huge duty-free mall and buys an entire home’s worth of furniture and appliances, only to have a herd of young boys deposit it all on a beach, is a dreamy slice of Fellinism, without the sophomoric grotesqueness that implies. Focused wholly on the matter of women’s lives under the neo-traditionalist boot, Meshkini’s movie (a big winner at Venice) is so breathtakingly textural and so empathic in its images, its transcends its context, and feels essentially timeless.
81/365: La Commune (Paris, 1871) Peter Watkins, 2000) (YouTube, Ovid.tv)
This late Watkins masterpiece, six hours long, may be the closest a film has ever come to fulfilling Woodrow Wilson’s dazzled praise of Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation as “writing history with lightning.” It is both a carefully historical and oddly futuristic film, made for French TV but never shown in France, limning the titular people’s uprising, a two-month period in which, at the tail-end of the Franco-Prussian War, the worker citizens of Paris, led by the armed National Guard and other disaffected military personnel, took over the city. With the formal government having fled to Versailles, a socialist program was enacted, and for a brief period a kind of empowering, egalitarian utopia was founded — people voted on everything, everyone helped each other, and the tension of capitalist dog-eat-dog ethos were scrapped in favor of a truly communal society. Of course it couldn’t, and didn’t, last, soon crushed by Republican forces. Using a large cast of non-professionals, and the mock-up interior of a single warehouse shot in black-&-white video, Watkins takes a textual leap, imagining the presence of TV broadcast technology in 1871, and so the airwaves, avidly observed and participated in by everyone, are a battleground between the right-wing Versailles news programming (full of sardonic pundits), and the spontaneous, elated, mic-in-hand reports from the commune’s front lines. The mob of over 200 Parisians is in a constant state of feverish, activist excitement, as the powerful elite we see entirely on TV are stuffy, regal, and perniciously dishonest, twisting facts, making absurd summary judgments, and characterizing the communards as crazed outlaws. (Watkins had the members write their own dialogue and cooperatively create their own scenes, and so for the Versailles media figures he cast actual conservatives, and told them to just express their own points of view.) The breaking-news immediacy is infectious, making vitally resonant history feel brand new and electric to the touch. The movie’s cumulative dramatic force is titanic, but it is, due to its extraordinary length, profoundly inspiring as well. And not just for us — as the commune and the film wind down and face their sad conclusions, Watkins allows his amateur cast to break out of character and speak about France in the new millennium, and it’s a measure of the project’s fidelity to human truth that there’s hardly a difference between the “acted” past and the confessional present.
82/365: The Boy Friend (Ken Russell, 1971) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Cinematic human-cannonball that he was, Russell remains beloved mostly for his manic, headlong esprit, particularly as it often jammed history and literature through the pork grinder of his own carnivalesque predilections, and even if sometimes (often) the resultant salmagundi of set design and hyperactive imagery ends up signifying little. Fan votes were split in its day — this was the first of the ’70s auteur-project neo-retro musicals, a crucible upon which Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich all scorched their ascendancies — and presumably remain so today, when the memories of the 1954 Sandy Wilson musical have otherwise faded. In terms of its conspicuous nostalgism and wholesale visual lifts from decades-old musical chestnuts, it’s the La La Land of its day, making a distended epic of early-century chintz out of a single bad day in a third-rate 1930s music hall, where the dozing audience numbers maybe a dozen, and where a movie producer has staked a seat, igniting a storm of performance anxiety. Amid the frantic sawdust and tinsel, Twiggy stars as a floor sweeper shoved into understudying the leading lady, riven as her delicately anemic features already are with her unrequited love for the leading man. Russell naturally crashes out into fantasy sequences and dance schemes lifted extant from the Busby Berkeley catalogue; everyone will react to the excess differently, but there are images, mostly revolving around Twiggy’s Erte-like form and some lovely Beardsley stage art, that are irresistible. Russell launched this antique rocket immediately after finishing The Devils, and as different as the subjects (and the movies’ ratings) were, there’s a hysterical stylistic continuity that’s Russell’s alone — he was a demiurge intoxicated with the idea that more equals much more, and that subtlety was for the half-alive.
83/365: The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjostrom, 1921) (Criterion Channel, Pantaflix, Kanopy)
A classic from the rise of Swedish cinema in the early ’20s, this Selma Lagerlof-based morality tale might be Sjostrom’s greatest claim to fame before coming to Hollywood in 1924. Certainly, it’s a roiling, vivid piece of work that either heavily influenced the Germans of that decade or shared much of their postwar DNA, in terms of visuals and the Euro-fad for reconstituted classic folktales. The film begins in a gaslight nimbus, at the death bed of a Salvation Army nurse (in Sweden, a “slumsyster”) who summons a local rumpot named Holm (Sjostrom) to her side. Too drunk to answer the call, Holm eventually dies and is instantly met by the ghost of a drinking crony who’d died the previous year — for a year he’s been the cowled Angel of Death, and now it’s Holm’s turn. The two ghosts survey the past and the future as it could’ve been, using Dickens, looking forward to Capra and constructing a kind of Escher staircase of flashbacks and flashforwards, in which Holm’s brutish influence also condemns his innocent brother and his own nuclear family. A harrowing late passage actively prophesizes The Shining, as Sjostrom’s drunk tyrant takes an axe to a locked door, and his frazzled wife plans on poisoning herself and the children rather than live with him. On the face of its story a rather 19th-century diatribe against alcohol, the movie is nonetheless electrifyingly realistic in terms of acting and nuance, while being also proudly expressionistic in its fantasy, as when, via double-exposure, the Grim Reaper parks his carriage in the ocean to retrieve a woman’s soul left over from a shipwreck. All told, it’s a consistently gorgeous movie, with cinematography by Sweden’s dominant eye, Julius Jaenzon, that lights the semi-transparent ghosts as carefully as the “reality,” and indulges in genuinely inspired imagery.
84/365: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2000) (Netflix, Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
One of the Coens’ sugariest trifles, this riff on The Odyssey as a Depression-era escaped-convicts comedy, rich in Southern sunshine and famously kneedeep in bluegrass and gospel, is a freaky pleasure, and there’s the inescapable sense that everyone making it had a shareable great time doing so. Taking its title and milieu from the Preston Sturges’ classic Sullivan’s Travels, the film posits a Ulysses (George Clooney) escaping at the outset from a Mississippi chain gang shackled to Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson), and his odyssey winds through its preordained (by Homer) route: on his way home and to a buried treasure, pursued by the law, confronting the sirens, the Cyclops (in the form of John Goodman’s one-eyed Bible salesman) and the KKK, and into the strident Mississippi gubernatorial race between two Huey Long-ish candidates. There are various tangents and larks, including reappearances of a bipolar Baby Face Nelson and a guitarist who sold his soul to the Devil, before the three schmucks find sudden stardom as cornball bluegrass recording artists. The KKK rally’s Busby Berkeley-cum-Wicked-Witch-guard-force choreography (which, with other Oz references, reminds us how much that classic is Homer-inspired, too) is a particular highlight, as odd as that seems.
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
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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