Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 13
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
85/365: Almayer’s Folly (Chantal Akerman, 2011)(Criterion Channel, Ovid, Amazon Prime)
Akerman’s final narrative film, this hypnotic adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel comes with a meaty payload of Southeast Asia exotica, colonialist comeuppance, and superbly crafted old-school melodrama complete with a ravishing half-blood temptress (Belgian-Greek-Rwandan beauty Aurora Marion). Characteristically, every shot has an idea for its battery, including a two-minute tour-de-force pan through the night jungle listening to two lovers plot their escape, and eventually happening upon them as if they were camouflaged animals. Conrad’s 1895 story is set in Borneo in the late 19th century, but Akerman knocked it up to the ’50s Cambodia, where the weary, bitter titular Frenchman (Stanislas Merhar) nevertheless refers to his recalcitrant native wife as “the Malaysian.” (The half of the movie that’s not in French is in Khmer.) Almayer has been set up for gold-hunting, so far disastrously, by Lingard (Marc Barbe), whose adopted daughter Almayer married, and who soon arrives to take his young granddaughter Nina away for a convent education. We know it’s not that simple: we’ve seen Nina (Marion) grown-up, in the film’s entrancing opening, as a Khmer dandy lip-synchs to Dean Martin’s “Sway” in an outdoor café in Phnom Penh, backed by a gaggle of lazy dancers. The crisis of Nina’s apprehension (her mother spirits her into the swamp to hide her) and her off-screen containment in the gated school only pressurizes Almayer’s doom; when she returns, fierce and hateful and full-bodied, the sorrowful fallout from self-pitying white imperialism takes tragic shape. The evoked sense of place and time is massive, and Akerman never hurries when she can dawdle and examine. This was new territory for the late Belgian — amid the colonial ghosts, in the bush of Conradistan, within the echo chamber of history — but few other filmmakers have made such a lustrous and ironic weave out of the iconography of maddened white men lost in Third World metaphors.
86/365: La Beaute du Diable (Rene Clair, 1950) (YouTube, Google Play, Amazon Prime)
Once considered among the French masters, Rene Clair took it in the knees from the original Cahiers du cinema crowd; Truffaut & Co. tsk-tsked at exactly what makes this forgotten late-career fantasy fascinating: Clair’s lavish studio-bound artifice (using the cavernous Cinecitta spaces in this Italian co-pro), narrative hyperconstruction and quintessentially French effervescence. A full-frontal version of the Faust legend, the film has scenery-munching stars Michel Simon and Gerard Philipe playing both Dr. Faust and Mephistopheles, young and old, swapping identities right and left until the demon takes earthly form, in a new New Testament kind of twist, and finds himself on the hook for alchemical scandal. A masterful sequence foretelling Faust’s powerful future — he betrays, kills and even invents atomic warfare — is shot by Clair with breathtaking through-the-mirror subterfuge, but for all of the movie’s visual gorgeousness it stands as perhaps the most philosophical and most modern of all Faust films. Moral issues of desire and happiness are twisted into knots. Typically for Clair, the hero’s ultimate salvation lies not with the angels or with Simone Valere’s love-interest princess, but in a gypsy caravan with a loving brunette, in a sweet 20-year echo of the director’s own A Nous la Liberte.
87/365: Shirkers (Sandi Tan, 2018) (Netflix)
A bracingly bizarre true-life saga of indie filmmaking gone squirrelly and disastrous, this new doc explores the unmaking of another film, which itself was — or seemed destined to be — Singapore’s punk-era generational anthem movie, a teen-written, candy-colored amateur phantasia-experiment that might’ve triggered a national super-indie New Wave that never happened. Tan grew up absurd in Singapore as a square peg girl in a round hole country, enduring a teenage ’80s and ’90s desperately scrounging for transgressive international music and film, and landing with her friends under the wing of one George Cardona, an expat film teacher and a kind of passive-aggressive Svengali-cum-Zelig, whose manner seduced filmmaking comrades wherever he went. When Tan’s loopy, semi-surreal teen script, a road movie set “in a country you can drive across in 40 minutes,” was shown to Cardona, he rushed it into production, as the girls were all coming back from their freshman college years abroad. But then, after Tan et al. return to college, leaving Cardona to handle post-production, he ceases communicating, mailing Tan only a few cryptic audiocassettes, and then vanishes altogether, with the 70 cans of unseen and unprocessed film. Years pass, and everyone’s dreams of the film ever being completed fade into bitterness — 25 years later, Tan gets a call from Cardona’s widow, asking her if she wants the cans of film Cardona had been secretly carrying around with him all this time. Spliced in is Tan’s roaming investigation of who Cardona really was — and the mysteries deepen.
88/365: A Farewell to Arms (Frank Borzage, 1932) (The Film Detective, Tubi, Hoopla, Kanopy, Classix, Amazon Prime)
The first attempt at adapting Hemingway to orthodox Hollywood folkways, this lush Paramount romance may not be very Hemingwayesque, but it is, thanks to Borzage, endearingly potent and often freakish early-talkie hokum, ignoring the presumably puzzling ellipses of Hemingway’s prose and dialogue and just going for the soft-focused pathos. The WWI lovers caught in the oddly troublesome circumstances of behind-the-lines hospital politics and the exigencies of war are played by Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, and while Hayes locates plenty of off-kilter, whispering emotional notes, Cooper’s brand of gawky emotionalism is rather un-Hem. Whereas the novel’s romanticism is as dry as vermouth, Borzage ‘s take is sweeter than apricot brandy, carrying with him the Murnovian pallette of gauzy grays and elaborate tracking shots he’d picked up from his late-‘20s years at Fox. He’s alive to the feverish moments of separation and reunion the protagonists experience, managing at one peak moment a pan away from a darkened bed to the window and the Italian rooftops outside. There are other pleasures to be had, including the amused awkwardness the couple exude in trying to close the enormous height gap between them when they kiss, and a bizarrely Expressionistic war montage that reeks of Gance and Pabst; a shot of a writhing bandaged man crucified in a giant, distorted Caligari box, with a Red Cross emblem behind him, is an undecipherable splurge of weirdness. Borzage was the first great Hollywood romantic, and his quiet, falling-teardrop sensibility flows out of this faltering hybrid like rainwater.
89/365: Macunaima (Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1969) (YouTube)
One of the underseen-in-the-West phenoms that defined Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement, de Andrade epitomized the Zeitgeist’s confluence of tropes — primarily, the focus on post-colonial class politics, a down-&-dirty transgressive irreverence, and loose and brute formal approaches more aligned with native sensibilities than adopted Hollywood-ized syntax. His singular international hit, this is a zesty, Jarry-esque jungle-village farce that merely begins with an old white woman (played by a man), squatting in the dirt, giving birth to a fully-grown (if pint-sized) black man (Grande Otelo). It’s not long (though the dry picaresque narration tells us years have passed) before he smokes a vaginally-conjured cigarette and becomes white (Paulo Jose), leading his hilariously scrambled family to the city, where they mix with thieves, nymphomaniacs and armed revolutionaries (namely the ravishing Dina Sfat, touting an Uzi and evoking Godard’s La Chinoise), and eventually confronting a monstrous billionaire-cannibal “giant,” whose daughter’s wedding feast is held around a palace pool filled with butchered corpses. Fluctuating on a whim between deadpan surrealism and Pythonish comedy, the movie mocks everything it touches, from racism to capitalism, sexism, insurrectionism, nativism, and gender orthodoxies, all in your face in a way that’s decidedly not “First Cinema” (Hollywood) or “Second” (European art film).
90/365: Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945) (Vudu, Hoopla, Kanopy, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
The extraordinary 44-year career of Fritz Lang, as cinema’s premier proto-nihilist, is also racked with a joyous sense of pulp irony. Throw a rock and you’ll hit a Langian celebrating the auteur for his “tragic” purity, but the boyish zest for the wicked clockwork of genre storytelling ever-present in Lang has gone almost entirely overlooked. He’s closer to Hitchcock than we’ve supposed — both spike their films’ dramatic sincerity with a self-conscious love for the way narratives can tie us up in knots. Adapting Renoir’s La Chienne, this dark saga is renowned as one of Lang’s greatest bell-jar proto-noirs, but a second look at it reveals an impish whimsy, inherent in the urban-squalor-meets-cozy-backlot-camp setting, Joan Bennett’s modulated but outrageous petasse fatale, Dan Duryea’s near-comic pimp-hood, and the gist of the classic plot as it’s adapted, a satire on modern art-world fashion-making that hints at the farcical thrust of Banksy’s Exit through the Gift Shop. Only Edward G. Robinson, as the milquetoast amateur painter suckered by tramp grifters and driven to homicide, retains a palpably earnest heartbeat in this hermetically closed-off world, and we pity him as acutely as we adore the filthy Bennett, flicking grape seeds into a sink of dishes and growling, when Robinson goes down to paint her toenails, “They’ll be masterpieces…” The final seizure with the ice pick is classic cold-blooded Lang — in 1945 no one else was going there — but so is the bubbly, sardonic mousetrap world around it.
91/365: The Wolf House (Cristobal Leon & Joaquin Cocina, 2018) (Amazon Prime)
A movie that authentically defies description — a feature-length Chilean animated film during which you’re continuously split down the middle by the runaway-train act of creation, and its product, the movie’s formidable, physically manifested nightmare affect. The filmmakers explore a very strange fairy tale world by essentially animating entire rooms, repainting walls and furniture and trompe l’oeil objects and life-size papier-mache characters morphing and sliding and mutating across surfaces and often popping out into three dimensions, and then back again; the (painted) ghosts of doors and windows abandon their physical selves and roam across walls, as perspectives shift and warp, human figures evolve from masses of masking tape to dolls to giant heads to eruptions of weeping paint, and so dazzlingly on, exploding into a new idea of mutability every restless second. The result is a very bad dream that compulsively metamorphoses moment to moment, as if fueled by dread and self-loathing. The plot is something else — a girl escapes from the notorious Chilean commune Colonia Dignidad (look it up), hiding out in an abandoned house and attempting to create an ideal family with two pigs, who evolve into human children and eventually decide to eat her… It’s not really a story, but a cataract of craft as much as of distressing mood. The atmosphere is formidably nightmarish, and yet we are always aware of the wires, masking tape, brushstrokes and crude materials, as the transmutations pour onward. This tension only ramps up the force of the many masterstroke moments, such as the central dinner scene between Maria and her new “children,” which in its howling entropy moves from mysteriously chilling to terrifying, as the idea of family is broken down into fluids and detritus as inevitably as a cadaver in the woods.
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
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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