Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 38
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
260/365: Golden Slumbers (Davy Chou, 2011) (Docuseek)
If an entire national film heritage seems to you to be a formidable and inviolate thing, something incapable of being forgotten or erased, then consider Cambodia. The story told in this doc staggers the imagination, and rewrites in your head any ideas you maintain about how movies function in the culture at large. For one thing, the very fact of cinema can absolutely be erased by merciless political action. Chou is a French-born Cambodian filmmaker whose grandfather was Cambodia’s most illustrious and productive movie producer. Chou didn’t realize this until he was already in his 20s, and the more he asked surviving relatives, the more bizarrely tragic the story became. It happened that Cambodia did have something of a “golden age,” from 1960 (the year the first Cambodian feature was “likely” to have been made) to 1975, when the Khmer Rouge descended. In that time, over 400 films were produced, Phnom Penh had over 30 moviehouses, and a real culture of movie love, fan-worshipped movie stars, and pulp excitement. The Khmer Rouge’s rather unique and radically single-minded agenda was to scour the nation of existing culture entirely, and so along with abolishing education, finance, and commerce, and butchering nearly everyone involved in such endeavors, they killed scores of directors, actors and technicians, and burned every reel of film they found. In four quick years, Cambodian cinema could be said to no longer exist. By the looks of the evidence Chou assembles — posters, radio commercials, soundtrack snippets, film stories recounted second-hand by a variety of nostalgic survivors — the movies seemed like a mashup of Bollywood, Thai, Japanese and Filipino genre hyperbole. But we can’t say for sure, because they’re gone — Chou mentions that only a few decaying scraps have been recovered, and none of that is apparently viewable. There are no film clips in Chou’s movie — it’s a documentary about a ghost cinema, about movies that do not exist except as memories, rumors, plastic consciousnesses that rampaged through this corner of Asia and vanished, leaving only ephemera and fading recall.
261/365: Jellyfish (Etgar Keret & Shira Geffen, 2007) (Fandor, Kanopy, Amazon)
A Camera d’Or winner at Cannes, this Israeli film is both familiar and otherworldly, modest in length and thrust, but sharp and poetic on particulars (somewhat like Keret’s short fiction, though Geffen is the screenwriter), and intoxicated by drop-dead bits of mundane magical realism. Most of all, it’s a woman’s film; of the roughly twelve characters, only two are men. As it is, three women dominate: Batia (Sarah Adler, whom Godard filmed so rapturously in Notre Musique) is a lost waitress numb from a breakup and confronted one day at the beach with a mute five-year-old girl who simply walked out of the sea; Keren (Noa Knoller), a newlywed stuck honeymooning in a Tel Aviv dump after she breaks her ankle during her reception; and Joy (Ma-nenita De Latorre), a Filipino nursemaid far from home and commissioned to care for a belligerent old woman. Confident enough to simply suggest the fantastical and never nail it down, and nervy enough to quote Vigo’s L’Atalante, Jellyfish is rich with motifs and mysteries, and displays a sweet, patient personality. Scenes often trail off like a dozing child, and dreaminess is a given, particularly once Batia, plagued by ambivalence about her narcissistic parents, gets hit by a bus and walks the streets of the city in her hospital gown, still searching for the wide-eyed nymph in the bathing suit that disappeared when she wasn’t looking. The film hangs together rather blissfully in the end because of its sympathetic aura, and the responsive presence of the actresses — especially De Latorre, who has a disarming way of seeming repulsed by and empathic toward the sullen Israelis around her at the same moment.
262/365: Snow Angels (David Gordon Green, 2007) (Vudu, Apple TV, Amazon, YouTube)
Snowbound North American malaise and self-destruction, played out in a low-rent suburban nowhere where the prettiest woman in town (Kate Beckinsale) waits tables at the Greek-owned chow mein house, where marriages crumble like thin ice, and where the high schoolers lives are an aimless mix of pot haze and marching band. Based on Stewart O’Nan’s debut novel, the film involves three interconnected families (a faithless high school teacher, a state trooper, another waitress, plenty of old folks stuck in their aging living rooms, etc.), but focuses on Michael Angarano’s sheepish high schooler, and on Glenn (Sam Rockwell), a chronically jobless drunk who’s now sober, employed and fervently born again, trying to be a good Christian father to his semi-spoiled four-year-old daughter, and to get in good again with his ex-wife (Beckinsale), who harbors a lingering affection but visibly bristles at the uselessness of every man around her. Rockwell is indelible; Glenn is a complex admixture of native intelligence and sour inadequacy, go-getter energy and finally ignorant fury. In this kind of movie, convincing realism is 90% of the battle — we know these people, even if the story’s fire alarms sometimes feel a little forced and predictable. The fragile, unhappy equilibrium suffered by the characters is eventually destroyed by tragic happenstance, after which only the acting sustains us; Beckinsale isn’t quite up to her big scenes, but Rockwell certainly is, and in smaller roles Olivia Thirlby (as an irresistibly funky high school new-girl-in-town) and Jeanetta Arnette (as Angarano’s weathered mom) are so vivid you could think you recognize them from somewhere real. Green’s improvisational style lets actors find the right stuff, even if their back is to us when it happens, and it’s a pleasure to get lost in.
263/365: Gervaise (Rene Clement, 1956) (YouTube, Google Play)
Based on Zola’s L’Assommoir and so laying a gimlet eye upon the Paris of the 1800s and the conditions of Parisian poverty, this postwar film actually feels rather contemporary, as if in some French neighborhoods in 1956 people could and still did live like this. One of those heavily awarded pre-New Wave films that never really persisted in the cultural forebrain, it is, of course, a tragedy, following the rather mousey laundress heroine (an utterly guileless Maria Schell) from one miserable lout of a man to another to another, only to find herself at one point saddled, in various ways, with all three, in a story whose devious construction skewers masculine loyalty, female spite, gossip, alcoholism and what Zola saw as his era’s almost feral selfishness. As in Zola, the film is not a matter of style so much as scandalous content — is it the first film to graphically insist on a drunk’s vomit, all over the heroine’s connubial bed, as a plot point? Sometimes hammy in that ’50s kind of way, but deft at evoking the 1800s with just a few old sections of Paris, the movie finds its power in accumulation — Zola’s “naturalism” means that no happy ending is in sight for these people. Or, actually, that no end is in sight at all: Zola famously told the story of these characters’ extended families through 20 novels, and thus the wounding end of Clement’s movie, in which Nana the little daughter of our lost heroine launches into the streets by herself, soon in Zola’s scheme to become a whore and then the maneating demimondaine Nana from the novel of the same name, itself filmed at least ten times over the years (but first by Jean Renoir). If you know some of this, a little blonde urchin with dirt on her cheeks skipping across the cobblestones can cut you.
264/365: Times and Winds (Reha Erdem, 2007) (Kanopy, Amazon)
This native Turkish art film is even more elliptical and allusively observant than the recent films of national master Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The setting is a remote Pontic mountain village, the time is unspecified, the cultural climate is post-medieval and Muslim (the hamlet has little but possesses its own minaret), the characters are two preteen boys who live out their lives in a state of embittered, anticipatory stasis. They watch animals copulate, they steal cigarettes, they work, but they also hate their parents: the sickly imam’s son relentlessly plots all manner of surreptitious patricide, while his friend, entranced by a crush on their young and serene schoolteacher, is revolted to find his righteous father spying on her. Other fathers beat and humiliate other sons and daughters and orphans; “shithead” is the label passed down from each generation to the next. But the action of Erdem’s film belongs to the quotidian, to the relationship between moon and clouds, to the unrolling of each day (and its prayer cycle) and of the seasonal process. Sure, there’s a obligatory coming-of-age primal scene, but the girl in question retreats to her bed and weeps after seeing her parents in flagrante. Aching with the Gorecki-like symphonic throbs of Estonian composer Arvo Part, the film outpaces even the poetry of Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive — Erdem punctuates his semi-narrative with surreal tableaux of his cast of children slumbering (or dead?) buried in pine needles, covered with the debris of a demolished house, in leaves, nearly subsumed by undergrowth, etc. You’re never sure what’s going on in these enigmatic images, or, really, between them (the characters do not express themselves openly), you’re just sure you’ve never quite seen this particular brand of mysterious poetry before.
265/365: 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (Michael Haneke, 1994) (Criterion Channel, Vudu, Amazon)
An early film by Austrian master Haneke, this intense weave-narrative foreshadows the majesterial Code Unknown, and states flatout that it will culminate with an impromptu public massacre (based, like other Haneke scenarios, on a real news item). But the movie’s structure is not coyly serendiptious, but mercilessly, and unironically, matter-of-fact — we glimpse, in 71 simple set-ups bookended by blackouts, a couple attempting a disastrous adoption, an old pensioner resigning himself to an empty life, a refugee boy surviving on the street, a pair of sallow parents coping with a sick infant, a student buying a stolen gun. As in other Hanekes, including Cache, the world’s tragic televised news haunts the background, conjuring a despairing and holistic vibe in which the micro is reflecting in the macro and vice-versa. The film’s Endsville, when we reach it, is almost an anti-climax, thanks to the masterfully orchestrated ensemble acting and the countless dramatic mini-explosions that are unleashed along the way.
266/365: Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2005) (IFC Plus, Apple TV, Sling TV, Amazon)
Maven of the pensive in-between, Kore-eda here explores the context and minutiae of a mundane urban news item: the 1988 “Affair of the Four Abandoned Children of Nishi-Sugamo,” in which four young and undocumented siblings were left by their mother to live alone in a Tokyo apartment for six months, until one of them, weakened by malnutrition, was accidentally killed. (The scandal that resonated in Japan was not so much the mother’s abandonment as the fact that no one in the building realized what was going on or cared to notice that the three youngest children even existed.) In the film, the brood’s ditzy mother (You, the actress’ whole name), arrives at a new apartment with only a twelve-year-old son, Akira (Yuya Yagira, a winner at Cannes), and mountains of heavy luggage — from which emerge, once the door is locked and the shades are drawn, the other kids, ten, seven and five. The rules, as Mom delineates them in game-playing fashion, are: no school, no leaving home, stay out of sight, stay quiet. A full three-quarters of the film, which was shot in chronological order over the better part of a year, is set in this penny-ante two-room flat, and Kore-eda’s intimate, ultra-realist visual scheme makes the ordinary textures and unfiltered city daylight bounce off the screen. The movie’s repetition and stasis is integral to its thrust; there is no relief from the children’s ingrown perspective. Only Akira can visit the streets and shop, and his trips into Tokyo are framed for maximum contrast, powerful images of a diminutive stranger in a strange land of tumultuous opportunity and harrowing self-exposure. Of course, as the money Mom left begins to run out, life in the apartment commences a devolution. It’s impossible to resist the maddening disappearance of Akira’s last coin — into a pay phone as he waits on hold — or the final lost train-ride, with suitcases.
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, 36, 37
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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