Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 26
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
176/365: Death Race 2000 (Paul Bartel, 1975) (Tubi, Fandor, Kanopy, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
This infamous pulp machine makes plain the simple fact that science fiction, when it’s done properly, isn’t about thrills but about ideas, social speculation, and is therefore a far closer cousin to pure satire than to horror films (with which it is usually clumped) — and in this case, the future-fascist-state-ruling-by-televised-homicidal-sport idea, which was at least as old as Elio Petri’s The 10th Victim (1965), hits the big time, 30-odd years before The Hunger Games. (It’s not a notion that could’ve arrived before television, because no one had ever seen social control like TV before.) In Bartel’s outrageously silly take (based on a story by genre maven and filmmaker Ib Melchior), America rules the world and remains entranced and juiced only by a televised cross-country race in which the drivers accumulate points by running over pedestrians. Talk about reality TV. Crudely conceived even by producer Roger Corman’s standards, the story tracks David Carradine’s mysterious Frankenstein (dressed, provocatively, in B&D zippered leather) and his broad-comedy competition (including Sylvester Stallone when he could be funny) across desert byways in a set of absurd roadsters clearly inspired by Hanna-Barbera’s Wacky Races. (One of the racers, Pam-Grier-prison-movie vet Roberta Collins, is a Nazi covered in swastikas.) The TV host, The Real Don Steele, a famous LA disc jockey, is practically the film’s lead character, braying hyperbolic announcer baloney directly into the camera in a manner that should make us ashamed of advertising media in general. The cheap gore and glib attitude toward road death is its own kind of commentary, of course — the race’s victims aren’t forgotten, as their widows are trotted out in front of the cameras game-show style and awarded vacation homes. This was us in the Nixon era, and guess what, it still is.
177/365: The Pleasure of Being Robbed (Josh Safdie, 2008) (Sling, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
You haven’t seen the likes of Eleanore (Eleonore Hendricks) since the ’70s, when Cassavetes movies bristled with compulsive nowhere figures living out their no-future lives by trying to seize the elusive present. She’s a low-rent, fringe-lost waif who supports herself through guileless kleptomania, and who never seems to contemplate consequences, only actions. At the outset we see her scam a woman on the street by shouting out random names to her until she gets a reaction, and then slips on the oblivious woman’s purse in a hug. When she grabs sidewalks bags unloading in front of a hotel, she ends up, back in her cluttered, ephemera-packed apartment, with a sack of kittens, which, without batting an eye, she names them one by one and then flings them across the room onto her bed. For the rest of the movie, we wonder how those kittens are making out, because Eleonore doesn’t. Shot in classic secret-camera verite style, this is Safdie’s first film (he and brother Benny would get to Good Time and Uncut Gems years ahead), and it’s a crafty indie, veering almost imperceptively into a dreaminess that could be read as Eleanore’s mental instability. Once she’s arrested, the gears of her reality begin to slip: there’s one too-brief shot of her wandering in a magical daze through Central Park Zoo in handcuffs, and from there anything we see — including a fake polar bear that’d make Guy Maddin proud — can be part of her strange, childish subjectivity. The subtle concept of Eleonore is the drug of this drifty, poignant movie, but Hendricks makes for a beguiling delivery system — we see the hypnotic disconnect in Eleonore’s eyes right away, and together with Hendricks’s adolescent-ish beauty, boyish affect and convincing I’m-invisible quality suggest a number of convincing backstory possibilities, none of which, thankfully, are explained out.
178/365: La Grande Bouffe (Marco Ferreri, 1973) (YouTube, Shudder, Amazon Prime, iTunes)
Italian provocateur Ferreri’s films often have subtextual mission statements, but the films themselves often hide nothing, and his favorite plot shape is the long slide down into chaos. In this, his most notorious movie, Michel Piccoli (a TV host), Marcello Mastroianni (a pilot), Philippe Noiret (a judge) and Ugo Tognazzi (a chef), all using their real names, convene for a fortnight in a gated mansion, to embark upon a “seminaire gastronomique,” abetted by a gaggle of hookers and a single, zaftig schoolteacher (Andrea Ferreol) utterly game for anything. They chow down on mountains of pate, roast duck, chicken, pork, mousse, pastries, oysters, lobsters, and so infinitely on, and the purpose of their debauch is never made explicit — a few smiles and nods about eating until they die is all we get, and of course we soon understand, as intestinal fortitude gives way to bowel trauma, etc., that these deliberate gluttons are acting out what Ferrari sees as the excessive habits of Western Civilization, hellbent as it is in the last century on trying to consume everything around it. (The fellas eat sometimes fiercely, but sometimes dutifully.) Eventually, of course, the toilet explodes. Like several Ferrari films (particularly Dillinger Is Dead), the satire is implicit, and the action is strangely devoid of content, comedic or otherwise — billed as a farce, the movie is something else, a quiet and observant screed, a cousin to Pasolini’s Salo two years later but with a simpler and slightly more empathetic arc (the characters are all deeply drawn), laying waste to modern man and refusing to tell us how to feel about the process.
179/365: Korczak (Andrzej Wajda, 1990) (Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
Trailing one of the 20th century’s greatest filmmaking careers behind him, Wajda always made films like a battlefield doctor takes pulses, whether exploring the messy present or the scars of the past, reaching for the disarming detail and conjuring unpredictable rhythms, and if the story of Holocaust saint Henryk Goldszmit, famous all over Poland as radio personality and children’s author Janusz Korczak, is a vital thread in Polish 20th-century history, than Wajda owns it. Coming three years before Schindler’s List, the film hits the streets of Warsaw 1939–1940, to experience the harrowing daily collapse of Polish-Jewish life under the Occupation from the perspective of the eponymous doctor-hero, whose only priority is his orphanage of 200 Jewish children. Wajda studies this fiercely holy man as a cultural anomaly, a fiery and passionately devoted non-compromiser who refuses to wear a Star of David armband, smack in the middle of the most thoroughly compromised historical place and time conceivable. Of course from where we sit we know Korczak’s trajectory will be brief and tragic, that his righteous nobility stands no chance of surviving, and Wajda captures this drama in majestic visual depth (Robby Muller’s pearl-&-ebony cinematography is breathtaking) but with a dry-eyed sobriety. As Korczak, veteran thesp Wojciech Pszoniak is properly indignant, humane, and appalled, imbuing the man with a gravity that amply suggests how much his dedication to his charges defines and emboldens him. Wajda is not afraid of idealizing Korczak, and as the march to the Treblinka train is slow and steady and filled with children of all ages, the film in effect dares us to believe that such a selfless and pure-hearted hero existed (he routinely turns down opportunities to save himself). The film about the most defiant and heroic Pole of the WWII years leaves behind a devastating sense of hopelessness, of watching evil easily win, on a cosmic scale if only for the time being.
180/365: Maidstone (Norman Mailer, 1970) (Criterion Channel)
A rarely-surveyed mutant child of the New Wave era, the short-lived directorial career of Norman Mailer can perhaps be best characterized as one of cinema’s most spectacular acts of self-eviscerating self-indulgence. Grabbing the era’s experimental zeitgeist as though he was wrestling a steer on a drunken bet, Mailer at the height of his fame as a runaway-bull novelist, essayist, self-promoter and talk-show spectacle decided that movies, now apparently freed from the bother of craft and viewed less like symphonic composition than like late-night jazz, would be his new playpen. In regards to film form, the treatment of actresses, and the employ of improvisation, the Warhol-influenced Mailer was interested in minimal responsibility, maximum entourage worship, and a filmmaking process largely fueled by free-flowing drink. His third effort, this relatively ambitious freak is a mock doc shot in the Hamptons, offering Mailer as a genius filmmaker (likened to Dreyer and Fellini, someone remarks, and it’s impossible to tell whether that’s meant as a joke or not) who is also campaigning for President, as he casts and shoots his new film (a hardcore remake of Belle de Jour), launches into impromptu boxing matches, and stages promotional events for the press. Quasi-self-satirical when it’s not just being outrageous, the movie thankfully has the professional energy of Rip Torn on hand, in the role of the protagonist’s wild-card half-brother. Amid the messy chaos, much of which seems to have happened off-camera, the most notorious moment is Torn’s — in the end, out of character, he comes at Mailer with a hammer, and the two have a genuine brawl — but as much as the film’s legend would have it be a “real” incident, it’s a clearly staged gonzo scene, illustrative only of a boozy desire for legitimacy.
181/365: The Adventures of Werner Holt (Joachim Kunert, 1964) (Kanopy)
It’s hard to deny that German cinema since WWII has had the tough task of coming to terms with Nazism; prior to the New German Cinema of the late ’60s onward, East German films did it by way of rationalization, self-pity, avoidance, or camp. Certainly, the non-Teutonic victims of the Holocaust are difficult to find. This New Wavey saga directly addresses the ordeal of ordinary Germans vacuumed up into the Third Reich rise, and does so with predictably conflicted results, equal parts suppurating guilt and implicit self-justification. The narrative pingpongs back and forth in the young life of the eponymous hero (Klaus-Peter Thiele), a freshfaced schoolboy who falls in with a wealthy, brave and fanatically patriotic friend and ends up enthusiastically going to war for the Fuhrer. Holt never develops an ardor for violence, though, and so the movie’s scrapbook structure focuses on the backbiting within the Army (fascism as an extension of high school feuds and bravado, as in so much Japanese film), the constant threat of ideological doubt-as-betrayal, and the fear of combat, as well as the romances Holt never got to have with local girls and lovely landscapes he’ll only recall as killing fields. A central tank battle, genuinely destroying an old Mitteleuropan town, is more convincing than a similar set-piece in Saving Private Ryan, but Kunert’s film also has its fair share of horrified and guilt-racked German soldiers and debates about moral relativism, which however true-life to some percentage also reveals a selfish desperation not unfamiliar in a post-Nuremberg world.
182/365: Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers on the Bridge) (Leos Carax, 1991) (YouTube, Google Play, Amazon Prime)
A big, fat, eccentric, world-class piece of filmmaking brio, at that time the most expensive French film ever made, Carax’s great, grand folly is something of a miracle of visual experience. Unable to commandeer Paris to his whims, Carax had the famous Pont Neuf and its immediate surroundings rebuilt to scale in the south of France, and for a film so spectacular to look at, it’s amazing that it’s essentially about homeless people. Alex (Denis Lavant) is a gnome-like young outcast and street performer living on the bridge, which is closed for repair during the French Bicentennial. When we first see him, he wanders stone-drunk into the street and has his ankle run over by a car. (The ensuing hospital and hospice visit, bursting with real lowlife, is chilling.) When he returns to the bridge and his old street-mate (Klaus-Michael Gruber), he encounters a new denizen on the bridge: Michele (Juliette Binoche), an artist who’s going blind and is therefore on the run from her old life. Their ensuing romance is unlike any you’ve ever seen in movies: the characters’ symbiotic passion is communicated not through the actors, who are largely tense with survival, but through the kaleidoscopic visuals — Carax achieves moments of spectacle and absurd poetry you have a hard time believing even as you see them. The water-skiing-under-fireworks epiphany, the subway corridor of flames Alex creates when he sets the “missing” posters of Michele on fire, Michele’s candle-lit, after-hours trip to a museum to inspect a Renaissance masterpiece before her eyesight fails altogether (a scene stolen for The English Patient) — the movie fairly explodes with invention and strangeness. Carax had a vision, certainly, and routinely risked everything to get it on film. This headlong, aberrant sensibility extends to the casting — while Binoche is a natural choice, Lavant (whom Carax had used in his previous movies as well) is an inexpressive, stripped-naked neolithic man, and since the movie’s largely from his viewpoint, the effect is odd, dazzling distance, not intimacy.
Year Three 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
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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