Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 29
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
197/365: Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995) (Criterion Channel, Vudu, SundanceNow, Youtube, Amazon)
Perhaps Haynes’ masterwork, this harrowing and sad demi-comedy, if that’s how it strikes you, is a feast of metaphor. Julianne Moore is Carol, the perfect, ambitionless, spoiled, hermetically sealed California housewife, blandly taking her wealth for granted and filling her days with shopping and beauty parlor appointments. Haynes knows she’s superficially a stereotype, but the film throbs with feeling for her; you can see that Carol’s wan beauty as carried her her whole life, got her married to an uninteresting but rich businessman (Xander Berkeley), and now the maintenance of her servant-filled lifestyle is all she has to occupy her. The movie’s carefully camera- orchestrated menace warns us early that something dreadful is happening under the skin of Carol’s life, waiting to surface — and when she descends into illness, and, equally, treatment, it’s pensively slow. Very often we’re just watching Carol as she listens to the mad machinery of her body, as the drama boxes are checked: the skeptical husband, the disbelieving medical personnel, the worthless psychiatrist, the public breakdowns. Technically, Carol’s symptoms are minor, but because Haynes has built an atmosphere drenched in anxiety, when her nose bleeds, it’s apocalyptic. Carol decides she has “environmental illness,” and goes to an Arizona retreat full of like-afflicted losers; but just as we’re sure a group encounter scene is wearing its silliness a little thin, it turns painful and real. It’s an extremely restless and lonesome movie; every scene is an unanswered question, and we’re never asked to conclude that Carol is psychosomatic, or just nuts, or even in fact genuinely ill — it doesn’t matter. She, and her odious “environment,” just is. Like its topic, Haynes’ mystery achievement is insidious— it gets under your skin
198/365: Story of a Love Affair (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1950) (Kanopy, Amazon)
Antonioni’s gift to film culture came in the form of a silk-smooth cocktail mixed from flat-out existentialism and a more specific, fascinated critique of the postwar bourgeoisie. Differing from the trendy neo-realism vibe, this was his first film, coming with an instantly recognizable Antonioniesque conflict between the images’ stark, angular beauty and the characters’ internal miseries. A nondescript corporate flunky hires an equally nondescript private eye to trail the boss’s new trophy wife and find out about her semi-mysterious past. So he does, lying about his intentions to each of the unseen woman’s past acquaintances, and a secret is partially revealed, involving the new wife’s relationship with a man and a girl who died by falling down an open elevator shaft. Was it a love triangle murder? The movie seems to be inquisitively exploring a story that happen years before, but the detective’s questions start a new chain reaction that reaches the peak-of-the-triangle man in question, Guido (Massimo Girotti), who seeks out the zillionaire’s-wife Paola (Lucia Bose) to find out why this dark story of blood and guilt is being suddenly dug up out of the past. The dominoes continue to fall, as Paola and Guido, at present on opposite ends of the economic spectrum, strike up their old romance under the husband’s sniffing nose, and begin to contemplate James M. Cain-style skullduggery even as they hold each others’ feet to the fire of that old crime, which might have been an accident after all but for which they’re both riddled with guilt and resentment. Slowly, the tale leaks into full-on noir territory, but in a manner particular to Antonioni — every gesture, every act of rationalization, and every criminal conclusion has the torque of thematic meaning, of a deadened modern life. Filled with lengthy Antonioni-esque tracking-shot ravishments, it’s one of the great first films.
199/365: Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, 2006) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy, Amazon)
Reichardt’s second film reveals her mastery of unspoken moments and invisible, but palable, emotional revelation. Hand-sized, subtle as a whisper, and swoony with tactile experience, this festival hit exudes a rare commitment to heartfelt naturalism, the most difficult special effect of all, and now Reichardt’s trademark voice. In Portland, Oregon — a national territory the filmmaker evokes pungently — one old college friend calls another: let’s get lost, just for a few days, in the Cascades. Mark (Daniel London) is a watchful, even-tempered father-to-be with a high-pressure job; Kurt (folk artist Will Oldham) is an unmarried searcher, still living the West Coast dorm paradigm with odd jobs, a headful of weed, and stories of spiritual awakenings. They head for a hot-springs retreat in the forest, can’t find it, camp elsewhere, then arrive and kick back. That’s it, but we see much more: this might be the only film ever specifically made about that universal moment when the bonds of youth begin to rust and fade and become irrelevant beneath the pressures of age and responsibility. The moist wilderness around the protagonists is unforgettably sensual, but it’s the men’s unspoken conflict, with the onslaught of time as much as with each other, that haunts your thoughts.
200/365: We Can’t Go Home Again (Nicholas Ray, 1973) (Vudu, Tubi, Amazon, YouTube)
By the end of the ’60s, Hollywood was done with the hard-drinking, rule-breaking, ambivalent humanist-iconoclast/auteurist icon Ray, and so fate (and pal Dennis Hopper) placed him in Binghamton, as a filmmaking prof to a cabal of disenchanted Nixon-era undergrads. With this growling, eyepatched scoundrel-messiah egging the semi-naked kids on, a movie was born, only recently, more than three decades after Ray’s death, given a final edited shape, by Ray’s widow. Made as a communal experiment on several gauges, the film is an avalanche of amateur-avant-garde hijinks, closer to Brakhage and Markopoulos than to Hollywood. It’s often comprised of multiple film images projected beside or on top of each other, in a free-associative scrapbook goulash; pieces are video-solarized into abstraction, others are projected onto nude bodies, and archival footage of recent unrest, from Attica to Kent State, is folded in like yeast into batter. The upshot is haphazard but not obscure — it’s a film about its own making, with the students awkwardly enacting their own doubts and fears about their unhinged teacher, and Ray provoking them to take cinema as a life’s-blood vocation, not just a career. In other words, you have the fever of nascent film culture, the paranoid heebies of the Nixon years, and the elegiac decline of Ray and the auteurism he epitomized, all wrapped into one unstable package. The narrative helplessly establishes itself after awhile, with Ray as the most ambivalent and dangerous Ray hero of them all, staging his own mock-suicide and making the kids wonder if everyone involved (and they were in waist-deep, for a year) would survive the experience.
201/365: Violeta Went to Heaven (Andres Wood, 2011) (Vudu, Tubi, Kanopy, YouTube, Amazon)
The best tragic pop star biopics flesh out unknown or unhyped artist trajectories (who will play Sugar Man?), and this fleshy, robust Chilean saga fits the bill, limning the fiery life of folk icon Violeta Parra from peasant infant to gunshot suicide, in 1967, at the age of 49. A favorite songwriter of everyone from Joan Baez to Shakira to Bono, Parra was a pioneering folklorist and initiated the international nueva cancion movement almost singlehandedly, packing eleven studio albums with reinvented native folk and playing around the world (including in Communist Poland). In Wood’s film, Parra was perpetually penniless and stalked by tragedy, and the movie time-shifts fluidly through her story, of which even her magnificently baleful songs do not bode well. Some biopic cliches could’ve been swapped out for more music-making (Parra’s prodigious recording career is elided altogether), but the movie is gripped around star Francisca Gavilan, whose grave, driven Violeta is convincingly four-dimensional, thrumming with maternal-feminist power and yet plagued by self-loathing and depression. (She also sings Parra’s songs, with scorching full-throatedness.) A rare Chilean export that doesn’t interface at all with either the Allende or Pinochet regimes, it’s a love letter to a lost 20th-century goddess, and it’s hard to resist her.
202/365: True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993) (Hulu, Vudu, Sling, Philo, Amazon, YouTube)
The first of Quentin Tarantino’s old scripts to hit the screen after the success d’estime of Reservoir Dogs, this weird but vibrant Hollywood hybrid bristles with the kind of energetic dialogue, idiosyncratic wildlife and fitful digestion of pop culture that already constituted a unique and coherent style. If only Tarantino had directed it himself. An ostensible outlaw-love-on-the-road tale (Christian Slater as a comic book store, Patricia Arquette as romantic hooker, carting a load of stolen drugs), the film scans as a salmagundi of genre tropes and scene-stealing performances scrambled with the blockbuster reflexes of its director — it’s shot as if it were Days of Thunder II, beautiful but befuddling (which is how you come to understand how Tarantino’s own images are often plain and all the better for it). Still, bastard offspring between two antithetical sensibilities or not, this movie gets much right — the confrontation between Mafioso Christopher Walken and wily blue-collar pug Dennis Hopper is pure magic, and one of the best chunks QT ever wrote, and Scott nails it, while Gary Oldman, Saul Rubinek and Brad Pitt all do master turns as, respectively, a scarfaced pimp, Joel Silver, and a completely roasted coach yam. Endeavoring to be hip by being retro, the movie shows its early-80s, old-screenplay spots (coke-addled Hollywood moguls, John Woo ripoffs and the ghost of Elvis, played by Val Kilmer), but in QT’s world time and fashion have no meaning, and he remains the only soul in the movie culture to honor Sonny Chiba streetfighter movies.
203/365: Zazie dans le Metro (Louis Malle, 1960) (Criterion Channel)
Of the French New Wavers, Malle has been impossible to nail down: one minute he’s doing gritty New Wave street romances, the next he’s making documentaries in India, the next he’s helming bizarre international productions and then quirky American indies and so on. Still, nothing could prep you for the departure that this bizarre film represents — it’s like a film from Mars, a very French Mars. Amid the Wave’s DIY burst of indie creativity it seems ludicrously out of place: shot in effervescent color, it’s an anarchist farce, baldly approximating the worldview of its titular heroine, a spritely, irreverent, vandalizing brat (11-year-old Catherine Demongeot) as she visits her uncle (Philippe Noiret) in Paris while her mother departs for a romantic weekend. Zazie’s destructive, carefree asocial escapades make up what passes for a plot; her uncle and an identity-swapping policeman (Vittorio Caprioli) pursue her across the city as she, a country girl, is determined to ride the Metro trains whether they’re striking or not. Based on an impish novel by Raymond Queneau, Malle’s film uses the whimsical semi-story as license to break the bank in terms of absurdist schtick and high-flying nonsense. Virtually no old-school gag-trick is left out: silent-comedy fast motion, gobbledygook language play, in-camera sleight-of-hand, splats of comic-book animation, musical impromptus, non sequitur cutaways, social satire, surrealistic touches (random shoes sold at a market play music when Zazie picks them up), even a climactic food fight-slash-set-demolition. The odd thing about Zazie is that it rarely succeeds at being funny — despite its Tasmanian Devil-like efforts, actual amusem,ent seems beside the point. There is a conscientious effort at facing down scandalous ideas with a kid’s guileless smile — sex is on everyone’s minds and molestation of the heroine is a constant threat (and a constant suspicion), albeit one that never dampens Zazie’s spirits. In one breathtakingly taste-violating scene, Zazie recounts to Caprioli’s cop over a messy plate of mussels how her father came to be killed by her mother — alone with the girl, the faceless patriarch was drunk and under the impression that the mother was gone for a long shopping trip, a scenario that we’re led to believe will lead to a pedophilic episode. But as Zazie begins to tell what happen next, throwing mussel shells into the sauce and splattering the jacket of her fussy companion, Malle runs her dialogue backwards, and only makes it intelligible again at the end of the story, in which the mother returns, catches the bastard, and kills him with an axe. Overall Zazie’s POV is the film’s, in which the world of adults as an assbackwards carnival of pointless propriety and sexually motivated idiocy, and sex is preposterous, scary nonsense, fruitlessly pursued at all costs by grown-ups who become foolish in its grip. Seen this way, the elan that bubbles out of Malle’s film is not only genuine but heroic.
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, 26, 27, 28
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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