Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 21
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
141/365: Through a Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman, 1961) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy, iTunes, HBO Max, Amazon Prime)
The first crepuscular salvo of the great Swede’s so-called “Silence of God” trilogy (followed by Winter Light and The Silence), this mysterious chamber wail stands superbly on its own, and might be the gnarliest joint of psychodrama in the man’s portfolio. The proverbial Family has, by now, degenerated to three men — a father, a husband, a younger brother — and a single, clinically insane woman, all of them stuck vacationing on the edge of the world together as the sky’s Godless ceiling closes in. It’s a movie-as-primal scream lab, and as the hub of this deeply troubling wheel of interrelationships, Harriet Andersson earned the actor’s Nobel of our dreams with this one film. Grief-crippled father Gunnar Bjornstrand, with a single scene alone in the darkened beach house, stakes a claim for the most heartfelt supporting performance of its decade. This is Bergman’s horror movie, equal venom doses Poe and Kant — a nightmare of love that climaxes at an extraordinary, bloodcurdling pitch with the slow opening of a closet door.
142/365: Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000) (Vudu, Hulu, iTunes, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Out of breath and dizzy with migraine frustration, Aronofsky’s torpedo-shot through Hubert Selby Jr.’s famous novel may be the definitive scag movie, in part because there’s no kicking the habit for Selby’s lost ones — just descent. More expressionistically funkadelic than, if not as witty as, Trainspotting, the film comes packing a point: for Selby, dope and television are two heads on the same American-escapist ogre, and so the (by now) familiar agony of stringing out and hunting for a fix is conjoined with the plummet of the young doper hero’s blowsy Brooklyn mom (Ellen Burstyn) into a diet-pill inferno fueled by the promise of game-show contestantship and scored by a maniacal infomercial in which the studio crowd keeps bellowing, “Be! Excited! Be! Be! Excited!” Aronofsky shapes the movie as one long, carefully constructed seizure — shoot-ups are fast, explosive wham-bam montages of needles, bloodstreams and contracting eyeballs. As a trio of Brighton Beach dopeniks, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly and Marlon Wayans are all subsumed by the formal hootenanny, quickly devolving from the handsomest junkies you ever saw to hollow-eyed wastrels. It’s all contents under pressure, tearassing toward a climactic Gotterdammerung montage split four ways, punching in between shock treatment, prison farm withdrawal, the most heinous systemic infection in movie history, and a terrifying sexual-exploitation scenario that’s shot like it has its own circle in Hell. Whew.
143/365: Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) (Vudu, iTunes, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
The only great roar of pure Gothic spirit in American film, the classic Universal horror cycle of the 30s and 40s wore its expressionism lightly, and anyone who grew up in the “monster culture” it engendered will know the imagery in their bones: the dark gray heavens of fake forests, ground fog, decaying castles, cobwebs thick as paste, Tudor villages, gypsy caravans, walking corpses, Dwight Frye bulging his eyes out like an electrified kinkajou. A hidden, faux Mitteleuropan hinterland where wolves roam free, the Universal horror landscape must have provided some kind of antiquey succor for Depression-era moviegoers, but for the Aurora monster model generation, the films felt more like sleepy, corroded dreams of violation (sexual, communal and otherwise), pubertal shock, and deathlessness. This seminal masterpiece, filled with the eerie soundtrack gaps typical of early talkies, can still creep under your epidermis if you make an effort to remove yourself from the intervening 90 years of exhausted familiarity. Of all Frankensteins, it is the grimmest, and it still stands alone. Whale cut a mark in film history with this moldy thing even if he’d done nothing else, but Boris Karloff’s lost, mewling patchwork corpse — embodying a childlike fear of flesh in all of its manifestations — is a conception and execution unrivaled in fantastic cinema. Even Colin Clive’s alcoholic whine burns in the memory.
144/365: Gas! Or, It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (Roger Corman, 1971) (YouTube)
An oddly ambitious venture for thrift-schlockster Corman and an outrageously loopy Cold War-hippie-apocalypse farce (written by a 28-year-old George Armitage) that plays like a serious of amphetamine-driven blackout skits set in the southwestern deserts and garnished with theatrical surrealisms. After a cartoon credit sequence making royal, contemporary-sounding sport of John Wayne military-conservatism, civilization is essentially destroyed by a leaked gas that kills everyone over 25, a development revealed narratively in a press conference and in impish joke exchanges. This is no Doomsday: our anarchist-free-love hero and heroine (Robert Corff and Elaine Giftos) are so high on life-love they practically romp, exiting Dallas (by way, ominously, of Dealey Plaza) for a legended commune in the barren west. They attract a few stragglers (Bud Cort, Talia Shire, Ben Vereen and Cindy Williams), and drive, encountering one absurd lawless-society parody scenario after another; a town is overtaken by the high school football jocks, mixing proto-Nazism and rape-happy barbarism with Gipper-style gung-ho, while the Hell’s Angels rule over a golf course with a Socialist bureaucrats’ obsession with rules of order. Meanwhile, Edgar Allen Poe, complete with raven, issues warnings from atop a Harley, psychedelic orgies break out, and God dialogues from the sky in a Borscht Belt accent. Armitage’s script is fiercely witty (if only intermittantly funny ha ha), but is rather adroit in its tossing of satiric handgrenades and seductive in its post-adolescent energy. It’s also a whip-smart window on the ‘Nam era in America, in ways that most of the films of that era that strived to be simply weren’t.
145/365: Khadak (Peter Brosens & Hope Woodworth, 2006) (Fandor, Tubi, FlixFling, Amazon Prime)
Here is a Mongolia we haven’t seen before, and does it in the course of a trippy magical-realism that seems, despite the filmmakers being Belgian and American respectively, authentic to the region. Our hero, Bagi (Batzul Khayankhyarvaa), is a the fatherless lad of a small sheep-herding clan living on the “gobi” plains; he suffers occasional seizures, which seem to insert his consciousness into a parallel realm where only the local shamaness can reach him. Their world is upset when a reputed livestock plague makes the Mongolia government relocate the family to a semi-industrialized mining town, complete with blocks of workers’ housing shooting up abruptly like an aging dystopia against the doggedly blue Mongolian sky. Eventually, Bagi is hospitalized for his seizures, and must escape from the system — but the movie hangs on its plot frame like a silk sheet blowing in the wind, making spectral connections and conjuring evocative tableaux and visually mourning the tragic, soulless modernization of an ancient world. Brosens and Woodworth make full use of the Asian dusklight and the steam that rises from everything in the Mongolian cold, and seize on compositions in depth, and try as you might you’ll find no evidence of a Western, orientalistic perspective. If the tale fragments in its last quarter, abandoning bilateral universes and chronology, that’s because that’s what’s happening to the old life, free and independent and intimate with the ground and sky. All that’s left, it would appear, is the magic in our heads.
146/365: Quiet Flows the Don (Sergei Gerasimov, 1957) (YouTube, SovietMoviesOnline, Amazon Prime)
Gerasimov’s five-and-a-half-hour epic has been famously regarded as the GWTW of Soviet cinema — and it is a seductive, rambling, episodic, muscular peasant melodrama (based on a novel by Nobel-winner Mikhail Sholokhov) that follows two extremely unlucky lovers as they face untold tragedy before, during and after the October Revolution. Hardly propaganda (even considering the John Fordian love of Cossacks, a military clan to which Sholokhov belonged), the movie is all about sex — a seemingly endless march through the struggle between traditional agrarian-social values and the messy reality of sex desired, refused, consummated, forcibly taken, and child-productive. Shot on and around the titular river so starkly it often looks as if it was photographed in black-&-white when it wasn’t, it’s a go-for-broke tragic swoon that Douglas Sirk could’ve made — given a taste of state repression and a love for the rolling valleys of south-central Rossiya.
147/365: Paradise: Love (Ulrich Seidl, 2012) (Amazon Prime)
Austrian depressive Seidl has always been a dedicated voyeur of the human zoo at its direst, and he went big with the Paradise trilogy, ironically made up of equal parts Love, Faith and Hope — qualities that are in harrowingly short supply. Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel) is a wide-grinning, obese 50-year-old divorcee disembarking on a solitary vacation to Kenya, bussed to a beach resort where laconic Africans work in colonial uniforms, where white Europeans lie like rows of bleached seals on the beach, and where lonely middle-aged women come as sex tourists, paying local “beach boys” as sex toys and escorts. In Seidl’s world there’s no median “normal,” and here everyone is either a lithe Kenyan youth or a whale-like European bourgeois. Bikinied and naive, control-freak Teresa dives in shyly, encouraged by a blowsy friend, and begins an off-the-reservation hunt for intimacy and satisfaction. The “boys” are never hard to find — they swoop down to offer every single woman inexpensive tchotchkes or guided tours, swarming around them like gnats. Focused more on love than just sex, Teresa endures a downward trajectory, boy to boy, watching her own innocence die as her funds are extorted (extracting donations for mythically sick relatives is the default beach boy grift) and her hunger for companionship is exploited for cash. The tragedy is palpable: Teresa is an utterly convincing woman, with reserve tanks of anger, strength and self-possession that keep the film from ever becoming a simple morality tale. In fact, her capacity for humiliation is nearly heroic. Like so few filmmakers nowadays, Seidl knows how to bring the pain, as his heroine implicitly faces the business end of her romantic lifespan, and the upshot can be galvanizing.
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20
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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