Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 36
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
246/365: Ornamental Hairpin (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1941) (Criterion Channel, YouTube)
An almost exact contemporary of Ozu’s, Mizoguchi’s and Naruse’s, Shimizu echoes a good deal of the other directors’ field of concerns — the plight of women in a patriarchy, the delicacy of the unsaid, the tragic spiral of romantic melodrama — but comes at them with a subtly distinctive way of observing his characters, similar to Ozu’s rigorous restraint but freer, more organic, less “perfect” and more spontaneous. This delicate thing, made during the war but defiantly obviating any mention of the world outside (excepting of a very veiled reference to a married couple by bashfully Communist), the film is entirely set in a vacation-spa, where the masseur staff are all blind and Buddhist monks arrive in noisy holiday throngs. There Mr. Nanmura, a young man (Ozu axiom Chishu Ryu) wading in a natural spring, steps on a hairpin dropped there earlier by a geisha named Emi (Kinuyo Tanaka); the injury is enough to hobble him on crutches for weeks. For reasons unknown to us but accepted by the other characters, he doesn’t think to go home, and instead the other vacationers (an old codger with two grandsons, a persnickety bachelor professor, etc.) gather around him in an ersatz family unit. They’re soon joined by the privately desperate Emi, who returns to the resort to apologize but also to run away from her profession and an unseen, unnamed lover-pimp-employer. The summer plays out in tiny swatches, as the community poignantly awaits the moment when they all must return to their ordinary lives, and when Nanmura’s foot is healed sufficiently, despite Emi’s unvoiced hope that he’ll stay with her at the spa and life will be one long summertime idyll. The story is as fragile as a paper rose, and Shimizu shoots it that way, keeping his camera at a respectful distance but every now and then daring for a heartbreaking semi-close-up that threatens to shatter the peaceful pond surface for good. At the outset, during the geisha pilgrimmage through the forest, the camera is part of the procession, walking with the women, backwards as it were, through a pack of hikers. And when Emi explains to her fellow-geisha friend why she’s not returning to Tokyo, as she’s taking down laundry in the sun, Shimizu frames the shots according to the work, and the result is a choreographed suite of rue and shame and affection that would’ve been crystal clear to a child with the sound turned off.
247/365: All You Need Is Love (Tony Palmer, 1976) (YouTube, Amazon, EnhanceTV)
An act of archaeological brio, Palmer’s mini-series doc is a welcome look back upon the long history of pop music as it evolved piecemeal and at the behest of musicians, before the 24/7 market ubiquity of digital media. This is Ken Burns before Ken Burns (less polished but smarter), comprised of interviews and archival footage both common and rare (including footage of a singing Woody Guthrie, and a tame Roxy Music performance that nonetheless affords a glimpse of a synthesizer-playing Brian Eno), and unfurling the whole story, from Scott Joplin to Earl Hines to Bessie Smith to Benny Goodman to Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Jethro Tull. The 14+-hour odyssey is filthy with progressional details — as when it is made clear how the WWI upkick in urban munition factories mobilized southern blacks to northern cities, encouraging them to leave the harmonica and piano behind in favor of the steel guitar and what became the modern blues. Destroyed are the common beliefs that ragtime, jazz and blues grew out of one another (they were completely separate entities, culturally and geographically), and that the Mississippi Delta was some kind of ground zero for the blues (you needed to go hundreds of miles upriver). Palmer also dedicates, amid the swing and rock and country and folk, entire episodes to pivotal periods/manifestations you’d never think to include (or wish to endure), including “music hall” (featuring Liberace!) and The Musical (oboy, Tommy). Pop music itself is by definition a very mixed bag, so some of the necessary digressions are less than lovely, but the banquet is large and long and enriching. A favorite morsel: a live Roosevelt Sykes doing the best “St. James Infirmary” you’ll ever hear, and giving it credit as a 300-year-old Liverpudlian riff to boot.
248/365: Cargo 200 (Alexei Balabanov, 2007) (SovietMoviesOnline, Amazon, DailyMotion)
The unaccented, matter-of-fact tone of Balabanov’s film is deliberately disarming — we don’t expect a cold-eyed slide into the human hellpit. Based on “true events,” somewhat embroidered, the movie is a poisoned-pen letter sent to the heart of the failing Soviet society circa 1984; Balabanov is here to remind everyone that bloodthirsty chaos ruled, and you forget that at your peril. Two middle-aged brothers, one a Army colonel, the other a “scientific atheism” professor, have lunch on a veranda — then, the colonel’s daughter and her black-market smoothie of a boyfriend, whose alarming thirst for vodka is the first sign of trouble. Haphazardly, vectors cross: the professor’s car breaks down out in the northern country outside of Leningrad, and he seeks help at a farmhouse, where the central figure seems to be a bellicose, gun-cleaning brute brimming with anti-atheist passion and a vague dream of building a Christian utopia. This odd, ramshackle home also harbors a Vietnamese worker and a skinny, seemingly mute man of untold provenance — and it’s this inexpressive sociopath who becomes the story’s agent of desolation, once the tanked black-market hood shows up a little later to buy booze. What ensues is all step-by-step minutiae — and an undramatic assault with an empty vodka bottle is just the beginning. From there, the film (titled after the military euphemism for soldier coffins coming back from Afghanistan, a salient plot integer) becomes a feral ordeal, but Balabanov is careful not to overplay the hysteria and suffering; the filmmaking is cool, unemphatic, unhurried, and the tone is low-amp jaunty. The lack of explicit textural cues — music, close-ups, reaction shots, etc. — often and deliberately leaves us with a gulp or a chuckle stuck like a bone in our throats.
249/365: A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, 1948) (Amazon, Xfinity)
Wilder’s healthily sardonic worldview did him well, you’d imagine, when he served during WWII as a colonel in the Berlin-based Psychological Warfare Division — this postwar comedy is intimate with the nexus of hypocrisies, moral compromises and ghostly trauma that lingered over Europe’s devastated postwar cities and cultures. His impish tour through the American occupation zone of war-ravaged Berlin is far savvier than our movies are today about the verities of the war and politics — imagine a Hollywood film today getting away with this line: “You give a little bread to a starving man, that’s democracy — you put a wrapper on it, it’s imperialism!” This from the mouth of a liberal American dignitary visiting Berlin with a buttoned-down Republican congresswoman (Jean Arthur), whose sole job is to research U.S. troop morale. Little does she know how comfortably, cynically, decadently high morale actually is in the mountains of rubble, personified by black-market hustler-captain John Lund and his dalliance with Marlene Dietrich’s weathered good-time girl (and ex-Nazi mistress). Structurally it’s virtua*lly a remake of Ninotchka (1939), with an ideologically strict naif diving into a hedonistic European fleshpot and being romanced and turned inside-out by a rascal with ulterior motives. To cover his own tracks and his girlfriend’s, Lund’s wily rogue puts the moves on the congresswoman, and antics ensue in paradigmatic Wilderean fashion, but you’re made aware of the political subtexts locked in combat, the contest between reactionary American conservatism and the progressive liberties that cannot be tamed in a war zone, the desire to reconstruct German society at odds with the yen for justice, etc. The film’s a lean, mean model of romantic comedy as a form of political dialogue. For Wilder, love is what happens when ideology gives way to reality. Star power helps, but surprisingly it’s not Dietrich’s movie — it’s Arthur’s. One of the great basketful of 30s-40s Hollywood personalities that often make even the most workmanlike studio product of that era still galvanizing, Arthur radiated with what movies capture best in the luckiest stars: the energy of will, the impish wit of ardor, the blazing loveliness of neurotic joy. Not a beauty, she was gorgeous from the inside out, rapping out her lines in a famous, beloved cashmere croak that might be the most distinctive voice of any Golden Era actress.
250/365: Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes, 1998) (Vudu, SundanceNow, Amazon)
Haynes has long been one of our most exploratory indie filmmakers, often reinventing “women’s film” melodramas in one crazy-yet-earnest way or another, but often plunging into realms no one else thought to touch — balls-to-the-wall in more ways than one, his tribute to 70s glamrock is a bouyantly gay, Citizen Kane-structured immersion into Ziggy Stardustism that tells us more than we may ever wanted to know about eye glitter, platform shoes, androgynous rock bisexuality, and the extraterrestrial origins of Oscar Wilde. It was his fourth film (preceded by his remarkable, and banned, Barbie-doll-as-Karen-Carpenter bio Superstar, the tripartite weave masterwork Poison, and the satirically apocalyptic Safe), and it’s mad for the era, at times shedding story and character like uncomfortable suits and exploding into pure, gaudy decadence. Jonathan Rhys Meyers is a Bowie/Gary Glitter amalgam, Ewan MacGregor is an Iggy Pop prototype, and Christian Bale is the innocent exploring the netherworld of overdressing, orgies and hallucogenic egomania. They all get it on, vamp, shimmy to old T. Rex — the film might well have given George Lucas, who unknowingly signed MacGregor up for three Star Wars movies as the young Obi Wan around this time, a black-hole-sized ulcer. Haynes quite correctly sees the glam phenomenon as few naive pop music consujmers did at the time — as a varietal of gay camp, which is to say, an escapist vision of the fantastical utopia that modern society definitely is not, virtually by definition. More than a bit run away with itself, Velvet Goldmine is a dreamy love letter to the one pop moment when being gender-fluid flamboyant meant being an idol.
251/365: Husbands (John Cassavetes, 1970) (Vudu, Tubi, PlutoTV, Amazon, Apple TV)
The mistake that people have made about John Cassavetes, both those who fall swooning at the altar of his films and those who find them overwrought, irritating and indulgent, is in considering him as a realist. A mere realist. Cassavetes’s films may look realistic, spontaneous and controlled in the moment by emotional typhoons, but this is not your Italian granddaddy’s neo-realist peasant drama. The only Cassavetes movie that was truly improvised was his first, Shadows (1959); after that, the scripts were fleshed out in grueling detail through rehearsals, and what grumpy Sons of John like Sean Penn and Vincent Gallo have seen as letting the actor’s id run free in a psychodramatic hothouse of booze and childish regression — cutting through the bullshit and getting to the reality — is actually a deliberate contrivance, a kind of expressionism. Let’s face it, grown Americans don’t really act like this, at least not for more than one drunken, embarrassing moment at a time, and Cassavetes knew it. He was pursuing a hyperportrait of people under pressure, and this mid-career film, perhaps his least appreciated, plays like an explosion of desperate buffoonery — three menopausal men go into tailspins after the funeral of a fourth — but the discomfitures and disappointments we feel as an audience are consciously built in: the three Long Island men are never quite clever enough to entertain us, their break-free trip off the radar of their lives lands them in drizzly London (London?), their midlife-crisis escapade never amounts to anything (not a catharsis much less an epiphany), they have no truths to impart about the lost meaning of their lives. What we get is a diorama of American masculinity on its deathbed, iconicized by the three weathered fools in black wool coats stumbling around wherever they weren’t supposed to be (home, work), trying to escape mortality but not having a single inspired idea how to do it. It’s a film about escape — spittle-flecked and soused as it is — even as it dares you to pity its obnoxious heroes for their fear of growing old and dying and having chosen the safe path while they were here.
252/365: Absurdistan (Veit Helmer, (2008) (Pluto TV, Fandor, Kanopy, Amazon)
Masculinity also takes it in the neck and groin in this farce, but in the gentle manner of bawdy Caucasus folktales. Bearing no relation to Gary Shteyngart’s novel of the same name, Helmer’s movie is just cotton-headed as his debut feature Tuvalu (1999), which was German (like Helmer) but dialogue-free. The new film was shot in Azerbaijan and in Russian, and its tang is distinct to the region, limning out a tiny chunk of village wasteland no one wanted after the Soviet collapse, and which therefore has left to decay in the sun. The hero and heroine were born simultaneously in the same room, were engaged at four and “married at eight,” but their mature consummation still awaits them, just as the village’s long and collapsing water pipeline ceases to bring in moisture. The lazy, hedonistic men hardly care, but the women band together to go on a Lysistrata-like sex strike until it is repaired. It’s a familiar kind of Rube Goldberg magical realism (a bit like Caro and Jeunet’s Delicatessen, but far less malevolent), where the village’s pre-strike coitus is often literally strapped to the various industries at work (a blacksmith’s bellows, a baker’s tub of dough, etc.), when the movie isn’t otherwise cluttered with rockets fashioned from old propane tanks, herds of ineptly shorn sheep, rooftop tubs of rosewater, bellydancing bonfires, and, gradually, scads of cowboy-&-gunslinger iconography. It’s a ridiculous yarn, and constructed like one (there’s more narration than dialogue), but the forthright taletelling is embraceable, and the Asia Minor-netherworld locales are hypnotizing.
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, 32, 33, 34, 35
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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