Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 30
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
204/365: Bang Rajan (Thanit Jitnukul, 2000) (Amazon)
A killer at the Thai box office, this historical war epic is easily the equal of Braveheart and Troy, but with a rough-hewn recklessness that carries the sulfurated scent of physical danger. (What isn’t clear is if the Thai film industry suffers not the foolishness of liability insurance, or if its stunt-people are simply expendable.) Hokey yet apocalyptic, the movie depicts the legendary courage and stamina of a single Siamese village battling the invading Burmese army in 1765, led by a badass in a tribal-traditional flattop-‘do and LeRoy Neiman mustache (Jaran Ngamdee, later cast in Alexander). This fresh (to us) paradigm includes loinclothes, cannons, foggy rain forests, long-horned battle oxen (!), archer legions hiding in mud-lakes, warriors jumping from palm trees, and the relative mercilessness of combat via machete. Jitnukul doesn’t have the budget or savvy for gloss, so Bang Rajan has a convincing back-to-nature tone and a knack for jackhammer montaging that make the carnage all the more immediate. The climactic free-for-all, even with a few splats of rough CGI, is one of the most dismayingly ferocious portraits of pre-technological warfare ever put on film, and the respect that the film pays to suffering, corpses and burial is enough to distinguish it among the Hollywood epic-makers. That, and the simple fact that it’s the one of the few historical war epics we’ve seen where the heroic freedom fighters are not lily-white.
205/365: El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970) (iTunes, Amazon, Apple TV+)
“Head movies” — a then-popular term remembered now only because Pauline Kael used it, sarcastically — were a recreational/self-exploratory counter-cultural dynamic tied to a few other social ingredients (cannabis, late dorm-room discussions, free sex, impulsive spiritual questing, reading Camus, rejecting the capitalistic order), and therefore exist in a kind of historical diorama, a fossil from what you could take for a more daring and idealistic day and age. In this museum, Jodorowsky’s infamous Mexican midnight movie belongs in its own wing, toward the back, out near the fire dancers and peyote scrub. Jodorowsky was intoxicated by a fuming cocktail of his own devising: equal parts second-hand shamanism, primitive Surrealism, pulp inconicity, peasant-culture savagery, nightclub camp, faux-Revelations semiotics, tourist Buddhism, genre gore, freakshow dislocation, and a defiance-disorder teenager’s flamethrower approach to anti-colonialist class critique. Who can say, then or now, what exactly was the filmmaker’s differential between charlatanism and aesthetic idiosyncrasy — i.e., between how much he gamed the Zeitgeist and how much he genuinely thought was visionary? Here, knee-deep in animal blood, the film begins what amounts to a three-part spiritual ordeal by thrift-shop Dada, structured on tribulative ideas of Jodorowsky’s own devising. Essentially, “The Mole” (Jodorowsky) passes through phases of actualized spiritual completion: first as a homicidal avenger, massacring a band of bloodthirsty bandits (who also are in thrall to fetishes and materialism, sucking on high heels in an overtly Bunuelian gesture); second as a questing Zen gunman facing down a series of increasingly cryptic “Master Sharpshooters,” in order to gain his tempestuous woman’s devotion (a process that climaxes with stigmata); and third as a bulletproof holy fool, confronting a full-on ur-America, a dirtbag Gomorrah everywhere adorned with the dollar bill’s Eye of Providence, peopled by bourgeois in furs, and happily trafficking in slave-trading and absurd bloodsport. The best way to read the movie, as in all of Jodo’s work, is as a dream of a world gone terribly wrong. Famous as a stoner mind-fuck party movie, it’s actually incredibly grim and disquieting, one of the most unpleasant movies ever made about salvation. Decades from now, that may be how Jodorowsky’s career is remembered — as one long, drunken, nauseating Day of the Dead parade.
206/365: Je t’aime, Je t’aime (Alain Resnais, (1968) (Crackle, YouTube, Amazon)
An ultra-modern missing chapter in the story of how the New Waves reinvented movies, Resnais’ sci-fi heartbreaker has been remade scores of times without credit, from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five (1969) to Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and beyond. Rarely screened since its supposed debut at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival was scotched thanks to all of France going on strike, it’s a criminally underappreciated genre piece, a radical experiment in which the filmmaker’s fascination with memory-as-story-in-flux gets an aerobic workout via that most fecund of speculative-fiction ideas: time travel. The diffident Claude Rich stars as a man just recovering from a suicide attempt, when he is recruited by a team of scientists to test their time travel apparatus, which so far only has only accommodated mice. (“A mouse hasn’t exploded in over a year,” one asserts reassuringly.) With nothing left to lose, Rich’s shrugging Everyman agrees, entering into the huge hot-wired chamber (shaped like a garlic bulb the size of a car, with a cushy organic interior that swallows Rich like a giant vulva), and being sent into bad-memory freefall. Scrambled, fractured, spiced with bits of dreams, his previous year of life gets revisited over and over again, and he is forced (as in Tarkovsky’s Solaris) to relive his romance with Olga Georges-Picot’s gorgeous schizo-queen, up to her death. Resnais keeps the equations open — we only discover in the end how the girlfriend dies, and how Rich’s hero is poisoned by guilt. But of course nothing is resolved, least of all the present — the “experiment” of facing down grief and remembrance goes awry, and the question about whether he can ever return (from where?) is never answered. Just as time travel is merely the literalization of memory and its inevitable slippages, the whole film is about the not-knowing of life and love, and the movie lets loose a very sad song.
207/365: Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998) (Tubi, YouTube, Kanopy, Shudder, Netflix, Amazon)
A gargantuan hit in Japan that midwifed two sequels and a slavish Hollywood remake, this postmod pulp is based on a vapor-thin urban-legend premise — a haunted broadcast signal-on-video that, once seen, curses you to an abrupt death in seven days. The horror beats are a bit too teenage-screamer crude, but look at the video, the concept of it (a rogue electronic meme, really, that poisons and curses the viewer — a few decades later, we all know how that feels), and the visual texture of it: a montaged splat of chilling imagery you could easily imagine to be how a ghost’s rage would look like if you could capture it on tape. As a trilogy, the three films comprise an insidious, enigmatic hell-cellar that becomes exponentially more inexplicable and qualmy the more information you’re given, which like all ghost stories amounts to guilt manifesting in ways we can’t control. Mercilessly paranoid where Cronenberg’s Videodrome was squishy-philosophical, the Ring cycle is also prone to breathtaking eruptions of subconscious lyricism — for instance, the second film’s Orphic ordeal in the well — that were well beyond the remake’s reach. By the first film’s first double-whammy climax, you may end up wanting to turn your TV off.
208/365: Elena and Her Men (Jean Renoir, 1956) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy)
For Renoir, the tensile strength of love in all of its realizations was an inexhaustible subject, and no one explored it as wisely and whole-heartedly as he did. This minor-key but essential Renoir piece is a frivolous but sage romantic comedy — or “fantasie musicale,” as the credits put it — crafted during the later, artifice-entranced phase of his career, when dizzy launches through old-school stage milieus provided the filmmaker with a window on social ideas of performance and behavior. Visualized as a theatrical chaos that burst its stage’s borders long before we showed up, the film is a tumult, focused on Ingrid Bergman (in her only French film, speaking lovely French) as the rather flighty Polish princess of the title, ensconced in Paris in the 1880s on Bastille Day. The target for constant marriage proposals, the princess wades down into the parade and beguiles both Mel Ferrer’s royal dandy and Jean Marais’s celebrity general. The context roughly mirrors the real-life rise of military leader Georges Boulanger in 1889 as a popular savior of the Third Republic after decades of insane strife and inter-party conflict; Renoir’s point is that state power is the flipside of romantic desire and ego, and the maddening knot they make together is as absurd as it is, finally, predictably human. The tale weaves in three lovers for Elena, two would-be wives for Marais’s super-general, at least three other menage a trois, a troop of Third Republic politicos, lost balloonists held as political prisoners by the Germans (this is after the Franco-Prussian War), servants and soldiers, battle skirmishes, and much more, a canvas so busy you could use a chart to decipher it. But of course Renoir trusts us to enjoy the bustling, silly throng as he does, and the movie is thick with physical comedy (always seen across the room in wide shot, so you might miss it if you’re not paying attention or, God forbid, watching it on a “personal screen”) and chiffon-light schtick, most of it hinging on Elena’s fickle heart and her strange obsession with propelling a man, any man, to world-changing greatness.
209/365: Capitaine Conan (Bertrand Tavernier, 1996) (Criterion Channel)
In this late film by Tavernier, the titular role is the fiercely independent leader of a brutal guerilla platoon of Frenchman fighting in the Balkans at the tail end of WWI, and as such Phillip Torreton commands every frame he’s in through the sheer decisiveness of his actions, as the most unpredictable figure in a vast landscape of incident and character. Based on a semi-classic 1934 novel by Roger Vercel, the movie is a tumultuous, rigorous trip down a familiar path: the war-is-hell WWI message movie, but Tavernier keeps the film moving so restlessly, and the characters thinking and reacting so quickly, that you’re never given a chance to second-guess it. Tavernier never moralizes — although his movie is clear about the costs of war, whether Conan is a hero, a bullheaded rogue or a dangerous psycho is a question the film never answers for us. The story’s crucial thread is the effect of guerrilla warfare has on Conan and his men — once they take leave in Bucharest when the war is officially, but not truly, over, Conan’s men cannot stop fighting. They loot, brawl and, eventually, hold up a cafe and accidentally kill two women. The tribunal is prosecuted by Lt. Norbert (Samuel Le Bihan), an artistocrat who gained Conan’s respect by joining the infantry and working his way up. Conan is helpless to save his men, until the platoon is sent to a final battle with the Russian Red Army, and the prisoners prove themselves in battle once again. It’s an antiwar film based not on acts of injustice or on combat violence, but on character — watch carefully, and what seemed at first like triumphant heroism on Conan’s part reveals itself to bear more than a twinge of sociopathy. Tavernier shot this like no other war film — the action, whether it be a torrential battle or a stockade argument, often comes at you from where you least expect it, deep in the frame, and then disappears again; it’s a film that could bear two or three viewings,
210/365: Gold (Bob Levis, 1968) (Fandor, FlixFling)
Here’s a living document from the ’60s, when music and movies could not just toss the rulebook, but act as if it never existed, making up stuff as they went along, with the copious assistance of very good dope, a ubiquitous and intoxicating sexual chaos, and a happy disdain for the establishment that’s never been equaled. You could, in short, make movies like this, on your own with a gang of nude trippers in the hills of California, and not be very concerned that the resulting product doesn’t make a lick of sense. Dennis Hopper’s famously ramshackle The Last Movie looks like an accomplishment of concision beside Levis’s film (his only one). Starting out with a crystal-clear suite of iconic ’60s images — ‘Nam corpses, Kent State bodies, Thomas Merton, police brutality, the Kennedy brothers — that you have to remind yourself were still accumulating when the film was made, the film quickly devolves: there’s a locomotive, a suited jerk conservative trying to reign in all kinds of free love and nudity and indecorous behavior (or at least profit from it), and Del Close as some kind of crippled pilgrim scrambling across the perfectly lovely western countryside. Amid the salmagundi of mud orgies, raucous skinny-dipping, completely arbitrary cutaways, plenty of full monties, Che Guevara, and real cannon blasts, you wonder, who wouldn’t have wanted to *make* this movie? And that’s the large picture: in the Decade of Godard, the authentic experience of making an independent film was at least as important as the experience of watching it. You sign up with an unhousebroken jungle animal like Gold — in which public sex is an act of open anti-capitalism — not for well-engineered entertainment but as a time capsule, a lost generational attitude captured like fireflies in a jar, predating Woodstock and doped on the era’s hedonism.
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, 29
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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