Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 32
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
218/365: Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-ho, 2003) (Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV+, Amazon, iTunes)
A police procedural like no other, Bong’s first great film is set in 1986 and loosely based on what’s been called South Korea’s first recorded serial killer case, lead here by one Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), a blustery, boorish jerk stationed in an unnamed semi-rural burg, whose battery of half-assed, TV-derived investigative ideas have gone as yet untried. The first body — a hog-tied girl, killed and dressed in a fetishistic manner — is found under a covered gutter by a shimmering rye field, and immediately the crime scene is destroyed by passersby, children and inept policework. (Bong sustains this in a two-minute tour-de-force traveling shot that’s the film’s first hint about how difficult it’s going to be to know anything for certain.) Park and his combustible partner Jo (Kim Roe-ha) regularly torture their suspects; Bong gazes at the abuse so calmly that the scenes slither over into black comedy. The duo is eventually joined by Seo (Kim Sang-Kyung), a cliche of a laconic, handsome city cop who dismisses Park’s caveman antics but who, it turns out, is also out of his element as more bodies appear, and the tantilizing clues pile up. The film ends up being about national, not personal, character — the slogan-sustained, terror-generating Chun dictatorship is just another hidden-in-plain-sight vice compulsion, and violence is a national reflex. That Bong locates a potent sense of rue and melancholy among its sly metaphors, yowling psychodramas and ravishing landscapes full of hiding places, might be the best measure of the film’s achievement. An entire battered swath of recent Korean history sneaks into the film’s margins, underneath its deadpan surfaces, and amid the unsolvable mysteries of dark places, moonlit fields and unseen events. It’s an altogether remarkable piece of work, deepening the genre while whipping its skin off, satirizing an entire nation’s near-sighted apathy as it wonders, almost aloud, about the nature of truth, evidence and social belonging.
219/365: Shadows in Paradise (Aki Kaurismaki, 1986) (Criterion Channel, Amazon)
Kaurismaki’s ugly, bittersweet Finnish hipness, born of forgotten jukeboxes, cigarette trances, mopey inarticulateness, and outskirt wage slavery, kind of began with this solemn comedy, the first of a loose and so-called “trilogy” later completed by Ariel and The Match Factory Girl. A relatively soft-edged tragi-romance, the film unites Kaurismaki axiom Matti Pellonpaa, as an implacable garbage-man, and Kati Outinen as a kohl-eyed store clerk, two inexpressive Everyschmucks from modern Europe’s dingiest backwater, happening onto each other and launching tentatively, inexpressively, into an affair, trying to make a life together. “Trying” may be too strong a word — in Kaurismaki’s films, part of the sad, cosmic comedy derives from the sense that the characters’ options are already spent, their life energy is all but used up. His characters follow a classic film noir track: Outinen’s testy galago-faced blonde gets laid off and steals a cash box, so the two awkward would-be lovers hit the road, in an ironic cloud of radio rockabilly. For a noir romance, it’s neither very noirish nor terribly romantic, but a conscientiously flatfooted investigation into what those genre impulses mean to us. The film’s dispirited texture is its trump card — and credit must go to the global-fest-fave Pellonpaa, introduced here as Kaurismaki’s signature actor and iconic Finnish nowhere man, lending the filmmaker’s movies a walrusy melancholy that’s unforgettable.
220/365: Closed Curtain (Jafar Panahi and Kambozia Partovi, 2013) (Fandor, Amazon, iTunes)
No working filmmaker possesses the hyper-context belonging to Panahi, who has become justly world-famous for not only being under house arrest in Iran until 2016 and banned from filmmaking for 20 years (for anti-government “propaganda”), but for deciding to make films anyway. In 2011 Panahi’s This Is Not a Film, a document of his doomed housebound efforts to imagine a movie into being, was smuggled to Cannes; this is his second outlaw film, a mirror-mirror rumination on his own struggle to craft art in a society ruled by Iron Age maniacs. We’re in a beach house on the Caspian, first with Partovi (who’s written several Panahi films), smuggling in a dog at a time when the mullahs were waging a campaign to erase “unclean” canines from Iranian culture, as he closes the curtains and blacks out every window with cloth, giving us the acute sense that from here on in everything concrete will be metaphoric, and vice versa. Trapped with the protagonist in these rather lavish digs, we’re perhaps less surprised than he is to be accosted by a twentysomething brother and sister (Hadi Saeed and Maryam Moghadam) invading the house after running, so they say, from the police. Eventually, Panahi appears as well, roughly alternating with his alter ego, and the film slips between the movie we’re watching, the production of it (which might include the script that never gets finished), and multiple movies within the movie, coming off as imagined scenarios that can be swiped and reconceptualized. Of course the real world doesn’t stay out — an ominous break-in and ransacking necessitates the intrusion of neighbors and handymen, and they bring others, creating a kind of social meditation on how life can be lived in a violently absurdist culture. Panahi has always been fascinated with how a film’s bell-jar bubble can be punctured, leaving a viscous interface between real and cinematic; here, there’s the feeling that the film itself is unfinished — it is, in fact, unfinishable, because life does go on.
221/365: Forgotten Silver (Peter Jackson & Costa Botes, 1995) (YouTube, Vimeo)
Like the film history mock-docs before it (think The Man Without a World, The Forbidden Quest, The Watermelon Woman), Jackson (years before he went all blockbuster) and Botes’s hand-sized goof is predicated on the addictive notion of a secret movie history — indeed, though barely a century old at the time, cinema has aklways seemed preternaturally fascinated with what it might not know about itself. Kind of like a Peter Delpeut movie with a bellyful of cheap New Zealand lager, this faux-history tells the story, via faux archival footage and interviews with Jackson, Leonard Maltin, Harvey Weinstein, Sam Neill, et al., of one Colin McKenzie, a completely forgotten New Zealand film pioneer who seems to have done everything first. McKenzie made stock out of flax and egg whites, was the first to invent a color process and sound, and even shot the first man in flight, six months before the Wrights. His tumultuous career disappeared with his unfinished epic Salome, the lost city-set of which Jackson’s backpacking team “discover” in the overgrown western jungles. A modest, made-for-NZTV satire on the excavation/restoration craze, the film is actually not often laugh-out-loud funny — instead, Jackson and Botes push their ruse as far as they can while still keeping a straight face. Their point, however, is strange and clear: that a complete grasp of film history, brief though it is, shall always elude us.
222/365: Un Flic (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972) (Vudu, Apple TV +, YouTube, Amazon)
Noir was what it was, but it took Melville, several years after the cycle faded, to transform the noir paradigm into a full-on dark night of existentialist tribulation. Melville films are studies in the famous genre’s evolution from haphazard Zeitgeist to the expressionistic poetry of modern alienation. His last, this movie opens with a signature Melvillian set-piece — a robbery of a seaside bank during a foggy rainstorm, perpetrated by a car full of black-hatted stone faces in a nearly wordless cascade of planned action and unplanned accident (the dialogue is in glances). The lengthy sequence exudes enough existential mood and noir weight for five movies; of course one of the thieves is wounded, thereby tipping the dominoes that will eventually lead very busy detective Alain Delon to the bank robbers. But in Melville nothing happens simply, and no police investigation unrolls in purely procedural fashion. Like crazy movie heisters, the crooks immediately start plotting another robbery, this time to abscond with a suitcase of heroin carried on a train by a thug that, not so coincidentally, Delon is planning to intercept and arrest. It’s in some ways Melville’s most American film — the climactic heist is a preposterous train-boarding-via-helicopter stunt that seems to have outpaced Melville’s budget (it’s executed with fairly adorable toy miniatures), and several of the key roles — the most cold-blooded of the thieves — are played by non-headlining Hollywood character-actor stalwarts Richard Crenna and Michael Conrad. Typically, too, the movie’s rich with secrets — Delon and Crenna (who owns a nightclub) seem to know each other well, outside of their mutual interest in girl-toy Catherine Deneuve, but at one pivotal point the three of them sit down and share a drink and say nothing. Somewhere, secrets are divulged, of course, but not to us. Melville’s hidden equations and doublings and postponed judgments were famously influential on Quentin Tarantino’s screenwriting style, and it instills all of the master’s films with a sense of fatalistic menace, as Melville’s repressed, hopeless men in trenchcoats go about their machinations in a world where they understand only part of what is going on, and know for certain only that things will not fall their way.
223/365: Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993) (Criterion Channel, YouTube)
Leigh’s methodology is famous: in a modern world where films don’t even try to disguise the fact that characters are contrived merely to inhabit the high-concept core of a film, Leigh’s films place the person first on the assembly line. Creating characters with his cast before any screenplay gets written, he realigns why we watch movies — not for crashing, hair-raising event, but for empathy’s sake, to share in the human moment. This scabrous launch into the night almost has no plot at all — an unsettling, breathtakingly articulate spew of apocalyptic discontent, the film regards its tyrannical bottomfeeder hero, played by David Thewlis, with the same compassionate dignity in which Leigh considers the man’s myriad of social victims; we judge his actions (which include near-rape, abuse, exploitation, etc.) but never the man, utterly shipwrecked as he is on the fringes of life with nothing but his whirligig brain and tireless mouth to justify his being alive. What Leigh did was take the existentialist docket of Beckett — for whom human beings were often reduced to merely a self-consuming consciousness and a non-stop gout of talk — and manifest it in the actual London, on the streets and in the flops and alleys. Thewlis’s caustic, ranting madman is at the same time a mesmerizing leviathan and a mundane, recognizable personage to any urban dweller, and therein, in pointedly poisonous form, lies Leigh’s ultimate program: the humanization of the forgotten and the inadequate. What filmmaker has displayed such patience and amused respect for the uneducated, even slow-witted, lower classes?
224/365: Conspirators of Pleasure (Jan Svankmajer, 1996) (EasternEuropeanMovies.com)
The unapologetically demented, dank movie universe of the famous Czech animator may be an acquired taste, but one that offers up astonishing rewards once you’ve made the leap. Svankmajer loudly proclaims himself a “militant surrealist,” although this masterful film has little of his trademarked animation — the disjunctions and dreamy weirdness are mostly live, and all conspicuously mundane. Like Bunuel before him, Svankmajer doesn’t need to make pretty pictures to invoke the irrational — all he needs is a room, a few household objects, and the will to subvert. All of the film’s six Prague-based characters are compulsively pursuing the same thing — sensual satisfaction. A magazine vendor devises a machine to massage and masturbate him in synchronization with the TV appearances of a beautiful news anchor, while the anchor herself eases the pain of a lonely marriage by fondling live carp, as her husband hammers together a battery of self-stimulators out of nails and fur, and so on. Svankmajer employs no dialogue (except for a few glimpses of news broadcasts), but this uproarious and discomfiting experience is nevertheless wildly satiric, roasting every sweaty act of self-absorption.
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, 31
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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