Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 40
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
274/365: A Blonde in Love (Milos Forman, 1965) (Criterion Channel, EasternEuropeanMovies)
Forman never made an immature film, never trafficked in cheap genre convention or cruel sensationalism, never indulged in pretension or cynicism, never underestimated his audience or his characters, and his films are infused with the man’s empathy, his behavioral intelligence, his gentle appreciation for folly, and his warm fascination with the particularities of common culture. A realist at heart, Forman is an essentially life-affirming artist, interested only in the human game as it is engagingly played, not necessarily won. Directly and indirectly informing the American’s own wave he’d soon emigrate into, Forman’s Czech movies are rapturous, affectionate tone poems to the quotidian. This modest and charming wonder was a worldwide hit and a touchstone for an entire generation of filmgoers. Opening at a dance — Forman was second to none in invoking the spontaneous textures, privileged moments and confused intentions of public parties, as he demonstrated with a chaotic vengeance in Fireman’s Ball — the movie eventually closes in on the travails of an introverted girl who, after a one-night-stand with a young musician, mistakes the experience for a serious romantic experience, and follows the lad back to his hometown, where his parents react and re-react and an authentic domestic debacle spirals out. (Thus the old US title, Loves of a Blonde, is plurally nonsensical.) Forman’s comic timing is perfect (there’s one shot of girls at an apartment window that’s so precise it’s breathtaking), but his observance of dead-real people and milieus, and his refusal to stereotype, made the film, as Pauline Kael pointed out, a comedy that’s difficult to laugh at. The characters and environments are too real, too dire, too sad. All of which is as high as praise gets for movies — the embrace of human ambiguity, the appreciation of how life meanders and detours according to its own whims, and “plots” are the stuff of daydreams.
275/365: Los Muertos (Lisandro Alonso, 2004) (Facets Edge)
The irony and wonder of art film minimalism, however dire it might sound in any synopsis, is that usually the less plot an attentively-made film has, the more that movie ends up showing us about landscape, the characters’ sensual rhythms, the knowledge of time and seeing, and the nature of patiently experiencing life, not simply being told about it via dialogue or narrative contrivance. Alonso’s film is an effortlessly expressive example, a trip through the Argentine jungle that measures out to be about 10% action, dialogue and motivation, and 90% raw vision. Less is absolutely more: those stingy dollops of context have a seismic punch, and what we don’t know makes the ellipses all the more troubling and resonant. First we get a single-shot preamble: a woozy, fixed-focus perspective walking through the jungle, glimpsing first a few bloodied corpses in the brush and then a passing machete — evoking in abrupt but dreamy short hand the memory of Argentina’s late-70s-early-80s “Dirty War” and oppression by the military juntas. Indeed, 15 years passes (or so it is obliquely suggested) in a cut, and suddenly a laconic middle-aged man named Vargas (Argentino Vargas, a non-professional and, perhaps, ex-con) whiles away his last hours in a relaxed, low-rent jungle penitentiary. Soon, he is free, to nearly wordlessly venture back into the jungle to return to his now-adult daughter. We get hints of what his crime had been, but not much more than that — what is happening right now in the New Minimalism is the priority, not back-story or what-comes-next. This threadbare outline becomes a magical mystery tour, in which Vargas feeds himself on honeycombs and the occasional stray goat (watch out, it’s a one-take take-down, slaughter and skinning), and responds undramatically to nature. Alonso’s camera responds as well, with patience and exaltation — we witness the forest, the river, the sky, the swamps, the trees buffeted by wind, all as experiences eloquent and moving on their own. But what’s unsaid about this man and his journey — indeed, the “deaths” of the title — is backlit by the chaotic richness of nature, and the tingly upshot is haunting in ways that conventional dramatic set-ups and payoffs cannot approach.
276/365: You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, 1937) (Tubi, Criterion Channel, Amazon)
In Germany going into the ’30s, Lang was already moving from gargantuan fantasy epics (Siegfried, Metropolis, Destiny) to explorations of an urban nightmare world overrun by paranoia, predation, mania and violence (M, the unmistakably Hitlerian Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse); after being offered industry rule by the Nazis, he left Germany in 1932, stopped off in Paris long enough to film a version of Liliom with Charles Boyer, and then landed in Hollywood. A compelling case has been made by critics for Lang’s American genre films being superior in fact to his seminal German oeuvre; wherever you stand, they’re hardly films you could mistake for the work of another man. This was his second American film, and the first existentialist young-lovers-on-the-run movie, presaging Ray’s They Live by Night, Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde, and all of the thousand films based on that template to come out since. It’s a pre-noir, a film whose desperation and Endsville pathmarking were a product of the Depression, not war. Henry Fonda plays a young, wide-eyed ne’er-do-well who’s been labeled a criminal and eventually gets sent to prison for a killing he didn’t commit. His girl (Sylvia Sydney) smuggles him in a gun, and with a corpse behind him after a breakout, the innocent young fella who couldn’t get a job is now a notorious outlaw. On the road, she gets knocked up and has a kid in an off-road Hooverville, surrounded by tramps. Eventually, the two are cornered by the law and succumb to the fate society seemed to have dealt out long before. It’s a rough and crude melodrama, which is the way Lang rolled in the U.S., but like the noirs that followed, it stands as a mark of its place and time, a cave painting telling us an elemental tale of Godless survival.
277/365: The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry, 2006) (Vudu, Apple TV, Amazon, YouTube)
Gondry’s dreamlike movie — his first without Charlie Kaufman’s script-guidance — is a love song to the developmentally arrested, mixing and matching levels of consciousness while adhering carefully to Freud’s faith in desire as a motivating force: desire for romance, for fame, for emotional justice, for a parent’s unconditional love. Gael Garcia Bernal plays Stephane, a Spanish twentysomething beckoned to Paris by his mother with promises of a job. The job turns out to be a tedious dead end (hilariously), but it hardly matters because Stephane’s life is a chaotic tug of war between reality and his extraordinarily rich and messy dream life — which intervenes so often and so matter-of-factly we often do not know whether or not what we’re watching is inside the hero’s lovable head. Naturally, the two realms bleed into each other, particularly once he meets Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a somewhat prickly craft-artist living next door who shares Stephane’s passion for handmade toys, recycled junk and dedicated pretend-play. Gondry’s style emerges whole-hog here, a savvy and affectionate high-tech/low-tech mix scrambling digital effects with cheap video, junkyard leftovers, folk-stitched totems and cotton clouds. There’s something preschoolish going on in the movie and in Stephane’s skull, and the film’s bric-a-brac style helps express Stephane’s needy, imaginative character in ways he could never articulate. It may be classifiable as a romantic comedy, but its narrative arc is so infused with non sequiturs and flights of cheesecloth fancy that it can be hard to tell what it is. What could be better?
278/365: Les Miserables (Raymond Bernard, 1934) (Criterion Channel)
A leading figure in French cinema in the late ’20s and early ’30s, Bernard eventually fell victim to the vagaries of economics and French taste — the epic, big-budget, big-message French film he represented soon fell victim during the ’30s to the far less expensive “poetic realism” trend, exemplified by Carne, Pagnol, and Duvivier. More’s the pity — this massive 4.5-hour adaptation of Hugo is easily cinema’s most definitive and powerful, and the one in which Hugo’s characters establish cosmic weight and presence, providing Valjean, Javert, Cosette, et al. the patience and time to inhabit their grand story and make it leave a footprint on your brain, not simply a fleeting, abridged-Classics-Illustrated impression. Bernard’s visual pallette became even nervier, evoking his character’s turmoil with a lurking, rocking, swivelling camera style the likes of which no one saw at large until the ’60s. As Valjean, mountain-faced Harry Baur is 100% downtrodden prison issue and zero slumming movie star; as Javert, a young Charles Vanel is icy and convincing without being villainous. But, as Hugo intended, the two men are just solitary figures lost in the bloody fog of French history, and this is what Bernard painstakingly evokes, with details and potent poetry — an entire pre-industrial culture on the edge of collapse, progress and war. (Bernard was also obviously a fierce advocate for society’s exploited and neglected, which puts him in rare company in that glamour-struck era.) It’s a Gibraltar rock of a movie, and it’s difficult to believe that it was ever forgotten.
279/365: Face to Face (Ingmar Bergman, 1976) (Fubo TV)
This international psychodramatic hit (and multiple Oscar nominee) came well into Bergman’s comfortable mandarin period, amidst Scenes from a Marriage, The Magic Flute and Autumn Sonata, though it feels in its particulars more like a film made seven or ten years earlier, when the globally beloved Swede was busy messing around with superego Surrealism and limning in his unique way the interiority of psychological struggle. The film holds little back and goes full bore into rubber-room dramatics with a toxic amperage only rivaled by Cassavetes, diving directly into the free fall of a psychotic break, beginning incrementally as Liv Ullmann’s buttoned-down hospital shrink Jenny bunks with her grandparents while her husband’s away at a conference and their new house is still being built. Everything seems perfectly sunny and successful, even after she dallies with a suave writer (Erland Josephson), and becomes gradually besieged by nightmares and visions. Pursuing a runaway patient to her own empty house, she is confronted by the deus ex machina of a pair of thugs, who try, unsuccessfully, to rape her (in a brilliant, unmoving bifurcated master shot). She shrugs off the assault as if it were a retail-clerk rudeness, but thereafter, her grip on ordinary life starts to slip, and as her carefully hidden secrets hit the open air, we witness as we haven’t in many other films a whole-hog descent into madness. The symbol-laden subconscious sequences are sometimes garish and obvious, but unsurprisingly the unblinking commitment of both director and actress muster a gravitational field difficult to resist; Ullmann was unarguably the decade’s stripped-bare mega-thespian, capable of dragging us into a character’s selfless, howling turmoil and making the trial uncomfortably convincing.
280/365: Ingagi (William S. Campbell, 1930) (KinoNow)
The first “exploitation exotic” film, triggering a barnstorming wave of subsequent “educational” epics indulging in “native” nudity and censorable topics, this grindhouse pioneer is distinctive for purporting to be something it absolutely is not. An outright hoax, the film purports to be the filmed record of a Congo expedition led by British colonials, zeroing in on a supposedly legendary human-sacrifice gorilla cult. Uproariously, the film is actually half purloined footage from earlier travelogues (including 1914’s Heart of Africa), and half original material shot somewhere in the overgrown canyons around Los Angeles; the “gorillas” are sometimes, in the very old reused footage, real orangutans, and sometimes newly-shot and very risible gorilla suits, while a discovered “unknown” animal is clearly a tortoise with a pangolin scales glued on to it. The old imagery is real enough — a litany of large animals killed and butchered, mostly — while the fresh sequences are populated by black Angelenos dressed in loincloths. (The “pygmies” are clearly schoolchildren.) Of course supremacist stereotypes are wall to wall (“more ape than human!” the non-stop narrator intones), but the movie’s transparent fakeness was what created a stir in its day (the Brit characters were fictitious, and even the Federal Trade Commision condemned the film’s dishonesty); the controversy meant a B.O. bonanza, making millions from what looks like a few hundred dollars’ investment. Meanwhile, the gorilla-craving-virgins idea grew into King Kong three years later, the “unapproved” U.S. exploitation circuit got a boost into the talkie era, and Ingagi itself sat for decades in the Library of Congress, unseen and undistributed, until now.
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, 38, 39
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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