Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 31
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
211/365: Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975) (Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, Apple TV+, HBO Max)
One of the American New Wave’s breath-holding landmark launches into sweaty American reality, this true-story tragedy-farce is what passed for a Hollywood star vehicle in those days — equal parts docu-accident, wide-eyed Method-y psychodrama, and choked-down comedy, all shot on the streets. The film is magnetic and absurd because it’s real, as we watch these native subterraneans stumble into the daylight of public awareness, in the dog days of the Vietnam War and Nixon administration, and become for a brief instant actual prime-time celebrities. Perfecting the New-Yawk hyperealist style that he’d found in 1971’s The Anderson Tapes, Lumet obviously sought out authenticity in lieu of normal Hollywood reflexes — famously, the supporting cast was even told to wear their own clothes. Al Pacino and John Cazale play two very real, very lost schmoes who in 1972 cluelessly charged into a Brooklyn bank and tried to rob it — igniting a day-long media carnival that played like a proto-reality show on microdots. It’s a torrent of painful absurdity, capturing a sense of mundane borough life, specific to the early-mid ’70s, so palpable you can practically smell the souring aftershave and sidewalk trash. Lumet knew authenticity was everything, from the buttons busting on police negotiator-human meltdown Charles Durning’s shirt to Pacino’s incantatory chant of “ATTICA!” in the face of cop subterfuge. Reportedly, the real Brooklyn onlookers that gathered during the shoot outnumbered the 300 extras hired by the production, and you can believe it — rocking and cheering, the neighborhood itself becomes a major character in the film. Today it’s anthropology; in 1975, for filmgoers, who could only expect for a few short years that a movie like this would be made at all in this country, it was a day trip downtown, still ungentrified and seething with unpredictable life.
212/365: The Story of Qiu Ju (Zhang Yimou, 1992) (Vudu, iTunes)
One of the key films of China’s “Fifth Generation” surge in the ‘80s-‘90s, this Zhang film is conscientiously unlike his previous, lavishly beautiful, costume-drama arthouse-catnip work — this risky, low-budget, scaled-down “revenge comedy” was shot in Super 16mm and in the contemporary lowlands. Indeed, the story behind it is mesmerizing: to attain the necessary degree of unaffected naturalism for the tale of a peasant woman seeking official retribution for an assault on her husband, Zhang took a duck-hunting tact and disguised his crew as villagers, hid his cameras in nondescript trucks, and moved them into a real village a month in advance of shooting. Thus, the real denizens of the village took no notice of the filmmaking when it actually happened, introduced as they were to the few professional actors by their character names — and that included Gong Li, who hobbled around swathed in worn clothes and weighted with a faux 9+ months pregnant belly. In her quest for justice, Qiu Ju climbs the ladder of Communist bureaucracy from the local magistrate to the city officials, and the exchanges are all genuine — when a nervous young couple applying for a marriage license are teased by a local official, it’s real, as is a professional letter writer’s boast that his two previous assignments have resulted in executions. It’s a simple, fable-like morality tale in the end that effortlessly fleshes out many of the ghosts in the Chinese machine, but also roasts human weaknesses that are exclusive to no one region of the world.
213/365: The Circle (Jafar Panahi, 2000) (FacetsEdge, YouTube)
Panahi’s third film, and a blackjack of thematic directness, in the form of a restless, wide-eyed urban journey shaped like a heart-attack *la ronde* bouncing without warning from one Iranian female character to another as they find themselves trapped in an Islamic fundamentalist society that regards them as little better than criminals or slaves. It’s a film of labyrinthine alleys, obscure portals and cages — the first thing we see is a window in a hospital delivery room door, through which a woman discovers that her new grandchild isn’t the boy the ultrasound promised and the father’s family expects, sending her into a mortal panic. We never see where her story goes; Panahi instead begins following two furtive women (Mariam Palvin Almani and Nargess Mamizadeh) who are attempting to elude capture by the police — on a temporary leave from prison, they have no intentions of returning. (Their crimes are unknown; in Iran a woman can be imprisoned for suspected sex or simply appearing in public without a chador.) Sent off alone but unable to travel alone without an ID, the youngest woman becomes utterly lost in the city (where men throng confidently about), until she crosses paths with yet another woman (Fereshteh Sadr Orfani), also a recent escapee, who runs from her home after her father and brother discover she is pregnant. The spiral continues — gritty and unrelenting (there isn’t even a score), the film never seems to blink. Of course, the movie was censored at home; Panahi’s persecutions would only escalate with his subsequent films.
214/365: White Cargo (Richard Thorpe, 1942) (Amazon, YouTube)
You can of course rail against the enthnocentrism of old Hollywood, particularly when it was trying, often not too hard, to depict colonized “Third World” cultures and peoples. Or you can enjoy the end-products’ often risible and rich absurdity, which is what you get in buckets with this unmissable white-man’s-burden pulp, a notorious hothouse melodrama set on an African rubber plantation staffed by irritable and weary Caucasians (Walter Pidgeon, Frank Morgan, Richard Carlson), who can’t believe their rotten misfortune at having to end up so far off the edge of empire. The film’s notoriety emanates exclusively from the presence of Hedy Lamarr, swathed in cocoa skin tone and looking about as scrumptious as any actress every filmed on a Culver City soundstage, as Tondelayo the “half-caste” vixen who sneaks out of the jungle and into white men’s beds. Cheesy, sweaty, reactionary, the film is a classic postcolonial daydream of its kind, but Lamarr is a wonder, particularly now that everyone’s aware of her status as an engineering genius and her spread-spectrum radio-tech accomplishments. Here she is, playing a dumb “exotic” seductress that could never in a century be mistaken for an African, and you just have to wonder what she was thinking, behind those laser cat eyes.
215/365: Medea (Lars von Trier, 1987) (YouTube)
Once long ago, Lars von Trier was an electrifying image-smith, and so it is that this early version of the Greek myth he made for Danish TV may be his best film. Shot either on video with a post-production mutation to celluloid or vice versa, the film is grandly expressionist, judiciously employing solarized shadow, shifting video backgrounds and visual degradation, achieving an abrading, intimate, primal force his later films only hint at. Some of the credit goes to the spectre of Danish cinema demigod Carl Dreyer, who co-wrote the original screenplay; as the opening titles claim, von Trier is trafficking heavily in homage. Although the script remains faithful only to the sparsity of Dreyer’s dialogue, von Trier’s stark tableaux evoke frames from The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr and Day of Wrath. He makes it look easy — images of wind-buffeted grass and figures stalking over waste-scapes, all of them layered with a gauzy haze, have the grim chill of an atavistic delirium. Medea (Kirsten Olesen) walks through sun-shower rainbows, talks in a whisper with soldiers across a vast lake, and collects charms in a foggy bog evoked with Maddinesque economy. Following Dreyer’s lead, von Trier artichoke-peels Euripides until virtually all that is left is the clenched core of feminist fury — namely, Medea’s deranging spite over the abandonment by Jason (a remarkably robust Udo Kier) as he marries a royal nymphet despite the two sons Medea has borne him. For options, the woman is left with exile, death and revenge. It’s breath-holding time once the story speedballs toward its famous and horrifying climax, which von Trier shoots in panting close-ups with only wind and bird chirps on the soundtrack.
216/365: The Round-Up (Miklos Jancso, 1966) (YouTube, in 10 parts, sorry)
Hungarian master Jancso’s seminal and rarely seen bell-jar ordeal does not traffic much in the long-shot stuntwork for which he became famous, but rather attends to the stress of a closed ratpit: in a compound on the vast puszta in 1868, shot as blocks of Antonioni whitewash and braced by filed lines of waiting soldiers, Austrians round up several dozen Hungarian peasants and systematically pit them against each other to ferret out the rebels in the pack. Lives are bartered and betrayed as if at a bazaar; Jancso’s cold postdubbing keeps us at a distance, not unlike the ever-present chirp of birds that we never see, because there are no trees. Iron Curtain agitprop that masquerades as “serious” history but also blatantly defines itself as anti-totalitarian protest song, this grim and secretive film has no heroes, and in fact the Austrian officers fool us into sympathy the same way they game the insurgents. (When the movie finally opens up into free space, and the rebels seem to have found salvation as conscriptees, they are not the only dupes.) No one living in the Eastern Bloc could’ve mistaken Jancso’s film for pro-Communist, particularly once prisoners, in response to the organized whipping of a naked woman, hurl themselves off a roof to their deaths. Jancso poses people and landscapes (and weather — the clouds do his bidding) in a distinctively chilling way, as if concretely manifesting the malevolent patterns that make up history itself.
217/365: Woman Is the Future of Man (Hong Sang-soo, 2004) (Amazon)
Of the Korean New Waves major figures, Hong is the gentlest, if also prone to bitterness; his “comedies” about twentysomething Korean urbanites and their untethered life path of power-boozing, disconnection and romantic failure have grown harmless and familiar in recent years, but in the beginning they were edgy with despair. More often than not, the men were treacherous louts — “You’re all animals,” Sunhwa (Sung Hyunah), the inevitable vertex of the new film’s triangulated anti-menage, morosely says at one point. We first meet two grown school buddies as they reunite for drinks after several years; Munho (Yoo Jitae) is a married suburbanite with a huge mortgage, while Hunjoon (Kim Taewoo) is returning from years at a U.S. film school. In the first of the film’s patient set-pieces, Hong sits the men in a noodle shop booth for almost six solid minutes, engaged in a conversation simmering with resentment and hostility. Hong then leaps backward to Sunhwa, who after another old boyfriend’s off-screen rape is gently left behind by Hunjoon; we leap ahead again to the restaurant booth, and back again (Munho linked with Sunhwa in his friend’s long absence), until the two drunken semi-friends, somewhat reluctantly, decide to visit their old girlfriend, each harboring their own secrets and each obliviously at a loss as to what Sunhwa might want from them years after the fact. Hong distributes information with a saline drip, and makes daring leaps — the film cuts from one happy flashback meeting between Munho and Sunhwa to a follow-up sex scene in which they can barely tolerate each other, show-jumping over months or even years and illustrating with a thwack the melancholy dissolution of sexual ardor. The mode is icily observational (there are no close-ups), and Hong doesn’t expend very much sympathy on his characters — not even Sunhwa, now a cocktail waitress comfortable with being used. But it’s a heartbreaking movie nonetheless — after they both sleep at her apartment and awake purporting to remember little, their paths diverge, and we follow Munho deeper into his perpetual night of discontent, looking for love in all the wrong places, standing in the snow.
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, 30
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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