Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 14
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
92/365: A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhang-ke, 2013) (Vudu, Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
Jia, easily the most original and acclaimed Chinese filmmaker of the last quarter century, often mixes documentary and fiction, using the monumental man-made landscapes of his homeland as if they were vast metaphors for political folly. But this is a Jia film by way of Tarantino, in a sense, opening with empty highway violence — three muggers with hatchets try to intercept a lone motorcyclist, who takes out a pistol and guns them all down. For a moment you don’t know what kind of movie you’re watching — a feeling that does not disappear. The gunman zooms by another cyclist in a long Army coat — Dahai (Wu Jiang), a loudmouth troublemaker from the nearby mining village, who has helplessly dedicated himself to protesting the embezzlement of the privatized mines’ collectivized wealth by the town’s magistrate, in a dynamic familiar from the oligarchization of Russia after the USSR’s collapse into market chaos. Beaten, sidelined and humiliated, Dahai eventually loads his shotgun, and goes hunting for sons of bitches — a methodical and gore-splattered massacre that Jia pulled from the news headlines. Tother stories weave in, and they’re all lifted from current Chinese events; three consecutive true-story tales limn the moment in average, put-upon Chinese citizens’ lives when the pressure builds to a crisis point, and violence results. Jia is one of those moviemakers who can tell a story in a single shot, and his eloquence is hard at work here, particularly in the third story, focusing on a struggling and mortified sauna-brothel receptionist (Zhao Tao, Jia’s wife) who’s faced not only with her married lover’s reluctance to commit, but brutal violence from his spouse, and then, in a camel’s-back moment, an abusive sauna client, who bats her around one too many times demanding a “massage,” and unleashes a knife-wielding fit of retribution.
93/365: Dead Man’s Letters (Konstantin Lopushansky, 1987) (RussianFilmHub)
Adapated from a post-apocalyptic novel by the famous Russian sci-fi brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky — testy Cold War cooperatives whose sanctioned novels are nevertheless structured around metaphysical uncertainty — this obscure Soviet saga demands eyeballs, just as Lopushansky needs global exposure outside of Russia to take his place as some kind of modern master. A ferocious anti-nuclear death march that may be the most visually daunting portrait of an irradiated society ever shot, this film — Lopushansky’s first — visits us immediately onto massive destroyed landscapes that look impossible to fake. Then, we’re in the cellars of a great museum, now in ruins, where the staff and various stragglers face slow poisoning in the dark or deportation to a great central bunker; our hero, an aging scholar (Rolan Bykov), watches his wife in her final throes and is determined to venture outside in the toxic ruins, stepping amid the scorched corpses, to find his lost son. Lopushansky is waist-deep in details and ideas, and his film gulps up monstrous amounts of convincing iodine-tinted imagery, as the dead souls of the story suggest dust-covered Beckett figures in gas masks as much as walking warnings about atomic holocaust. It’s a movie that can sometimes feel as though it’s restricting your breathing and poisoning your skin.
94/365: The Terrorizers (Edward Yang, 1986) (Asian Crush, Kanopy, Amazon Prime, Mubi)
Compared to the Taiwanese New Wave work of Hou Hsaio-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, Edward Yang’s early film, his third, feels almost French, a pre-Claire Denis-Michael Haneke-style urban weave of unease, duplicity, lostness and poisoned serendipity. Yang himself called it a “puzzle,” but don’t search for a tidy endgame. The inciting incident seems to be a police bust of a ramshackle drug den — the exchange of gunfire leaves several bodies in the street, photographed by a young slacker photog (Shaojun Ma) living a Blow-Up-style life-through-the-lens. Escaping from the bust with a broken ankle is a willowy Eurasian delinquent (Wang An), who starts to make possibly premeditated prank phone calls to mess up the other characters’ lives. A simpering hospital administrator (Lichun Lee) craves order and stability, even as he frames a coworker in a bookkeeping debacle in order to climb the ladder, while his wife (Cora Miao), haunted by a stillbirth and staying at home writing neurotic-housewife novels, edges toward implosion, and soon enough reignites an affair with an old flame. And then things change — the punkette flies the coop and begins seducing and fleecing pick-ups off the street; the photog (who knows the writer, somehow) moves into the old drug den and becomes obsessed with shots he took of the girl (her portrait on the wall, composed of dozens of taped smaller photos, fragmenting-fluttering in the breeze), the administrator begins to see his life play out in one of his wife’s published novels. Yang keeps all of the balls in the air, searching for his country’s erratic alpha wave in the waning days of the Kuomintang’s martial rule, as Taiwan emerged as a bona fide democracy in the mid-‘80s.
95/365: Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952) (DailyMotion, YouTube, Criterion Channel)
Heavily lauded in the ’50s and nearly forgotten now, De Sica’s miniaturist tragedy applies an acute attention to social terror and a disregard for narrative valves that gives the story a queasy immediacy. The titular retiree (played by Florence-prof non-pro Carlo Battisti) emerges as the sorriest of a mass of elderly pensioners, penniless, alone, on the edge of eviction, befriended only by a tiny terrier who eats thanks to Umberto’s soup kitchen bait-and-switch. His path is a slickly-oiled plummet, and De Sica often holds his camera’s stare with Bressonian steadiness. Likewise, Cesare Zavattini’s script is overcome by the characters’ “dailiness,” as he has put it, gradually squashing our naive notion of deliverance. Patiently observed sequences — like the boarding house’s maid (a hypnotically desolate Maria Pia Casilio) waking, watching a cat cross a filthy skylight, making coffee, stretching to shut a door with her outstretched toe — are weighted with menacing unhappiness, and Umberto’s life becomes a series of increasingly plausible glimpses of homeless misery. At its heart, it’s a horror film — a lost grope through an upside world. Eventually, the hero’s very home becomes a bourgeois blast crater. Umberto’s pooch becomes the cattle prod with which De Sica electrocutes our tear ducts; the film’s excruciating climax may make it the weepiest buddy-animal movie a young Roddy McDowell never made, but the social context of the neglected elderly is evergreen.
96/365: In a Glass Cage (Augusti Villaronga, 1987) (Shudder, Tubi, Amazon Prime)
A notoriously menacing international sensation when it was released, this Spanish psychosexual morality play scans like a particularly bloodthirsty Almodovar scenario, had Almodovar ever swapped out his ironic dash for full-on Grand Guignol. It’s all about mustering offense and scalding the conservative viewer, and like so many other Spanish and Mexican narratives it’s shaped like a closed maze, in which the family combusts like unstable chemicals in a sealed container, mixed with the legacy of Nazi psychopathy, a dose of Teorema, and an iron lung. The opening salvo has a Nazi in hiding, Klaus (Gunter Meisner), resuming his wartime predilections by torturing and finally murdering a strung-up young boy; afterward, saturated with self-loathing, he leaps off his manor roof. He’s only crippled, however, now suddenly a burden to his garishly repellant wife (Marisa Parides), and trapped in the artificial respirator of the title. Enter Angelo (David Sust), a strange and intense young man who insinuates himself into the house and becomes the helpless sadist’s nurse; soon enough, Angelo’s past intersects for us with Klaus’s, and a conscientiously creepy course of sexually sickened and ultimately psychotic vengeance emerges. Exploiting its nation’s fascist hangover in a fiendishly pulpy way, the film is crafted with fabulous portentousness and icy glee.
97/365: Moonrise (Frank Borzage, 1948) (Criterion Channel, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Archive.org)
Borzage had an epic career, spanning some 33 years and rising to distinctive peaks at least three times: in the second half of the ’20s, the late ’30s going into the war, and in the late ’40s, with a little-seen spate of hyper-romantic melodramas, before washing his hands of the industry in the late ’50s, and retiring. Of this latter run, this rarity is a strange postwar journey of guilt and self-torture that turns out to have far more in common with Borzage’s silvery Charles Farrell-Janet Gaynor silent romances than with film noir. Opening with a dreamy Expressionist prologue of a hanging (and of the dead man’s son suffering torment by his peers thereafter), the film lands us with Dane Clark as the grown kid, seeing red during a fight and killing his longtime harasser with a rock. From there, the small Southern town around seems to slowly close in, as he mutely pits his guilt against his bitter hunger for retribution on the world, while romancing harried schoolteacher Gail Russell. Borzage’s unmistakable voice converts this spare, angsty narrative into a hothouse flower, creating a misty Southern agraria out of tight studio sets, locating oddball romantic epiphanies in unlikely moments, and cultivating the sense that the murder plotline is just getting in the way of what should be a sweaty, shadowy love ballad. Clark’s tight-lipped, mopey glower is just one of the film’s odd-fitting facets, while Russell’s tragically nervous beauty seems somehow perfectly suited for Borzage’s worldview. There are moments that could justify a one-off’s reputation, as when, a propos of nothing, Henry Morgan’s deaf-mute village idiot gingerly places his feet over the sidewalk-cement footprints he made as a kid — and doesn’t quite get why they don’t fit.
98/365: Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016) (Kanopy, Vudu, iTunes, Amazon Prime)
This German comedy emerged from the Cannes Film Festival as perhaps the most lavishly praised European film of modern times; the aggregate critics’ ratings broke the record for the most stars in Screen Daily’s annual festival poll. For a comedy, from Germany? The focus falls on Winfried (Peter Simonischek), a bearish, 60-something music teacher and slovenly child of a man quietly facing retirement and devoted to anarchic irreverence and social rule-busting. (He can hardly keep himself from wearing fake Mortimer Snerd teeth in public, and making up absurd alternate identities for himself every time he meets someone new). An aging, widowed vestige of the progressive Willy Brandt era, Winfried is something like an agent of nonconformist chaos, but in a genial, shrugging way that no one in the film can ever find irritating. That is, except his daughter Ines (Sandra Huller), a buttoned-up, lean-in corporate loner, unmarried and devoted only to her career as a management consultant, in a sea of suited men. Once Winfried’s beloved dog dies, the fading hulk of happy disorder follows his semi-estranged daughter to Bucharest, where her firm is busy figuring out lay-off methodologies for a Romanian oil company. His aim is mysterious, but certainly seems to have something to do with disrupting Ines’ cold-blooded professional life and thereby saving her soul. There ensues a grand pas de deux of haphazard mortification, as Winfried infiltrates Ines’ workplace situation, masquerading as an ambassador or consultant himself, but always in a cretinous rock-star wig everyone just agrees not to acknowledge. But then Toni Erdmann — the title is Winfried’s go-to nom de prank — evolves, and grows both in its capacity for embarrassment, which is nearly epic, and in its organic warmth for these characters, whose mutual history seeps out of the action like humidity. There are entire set pieces you never see coming that transcend what you thought the story was — moments of neurotic unraveling, of collective near-madness, of father-daughter connectiveness echoing long-gone family moments we’re never told about.
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
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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