Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 48
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
330/365: Center Stage (Stanley Kwan, 1991) (Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon)
Amidst the runaway zoo of the Hong Kong film industry in the late ‘80s-early ’90s, Kwan’s signature films were radically, entrancingly meditative, and this remains his chef-d’oeuvre, a deceptively rich daydream about the life of movies. It’s a full-on tragic biopic, swooning sadly over the last few years of Ruan Lingyu (Maggie Cheung), who became China’s most beloved screen star in the early ’30s (when the industry was still silent) and then committed suicide at the age of 24. Her brief and mysterious downward trajectory — it was relentless tabloid gossip about her divorce and affair with a married tea tycoon that slammed her — would vex a Hollywood biographer, but Kwan isn’t looking for melodrama so much as lamentation. He crafts a fugue of meta layers, freely cutting from his rather Bertoluccian historical reenactments to weathered footage from Ruan’s actual ’30s films, recreations of lost films’ imagery, behind-the-scenes production-meeting chats with Cheung and the rest of the cast and crew (some of which seem rehearsed, because of course), doc interviews with surviving Ruan-era vets and scholars, and footage of Kwan filming all of it (and himself) — and sometimes slipping from one to the other within a single shot. It’s one of those movies crazy in love with movies, and as Ruan, Cheung is a true heartbreaker: radiant and compassionate, a larger-than-life goddess of impossible poise, tenderness and confident modesty.
331/365: Her Man (Tay Garnett, 1930) (YouTube)
So pre-Code it doesn’t ever try to disguise what it’s about, this early talkie is the grungiest version of the Frankie and Johnny tale ever filmed, set almost entirely in a Cuban bar-slash-whorehouse and free of a single minute of sobriety. Released within months of Clarence Brown’s Anna Christie and Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco, both of which it echoes in structure or substance, the film begins trailing after battered old slut Marjorie Rambeau as she tries to get off a passenger ship in the U.S., but is summarily turned around, to end up slogging back to Havana, one of those edge-of-the-world waystations where prostitutes and loners go to be buried. There, we meet the young Frankie (Helen Twelvetrees), a doleful, pocket-picking sprite of a working girl lamenting her destiny, and her manipulative pimp, Johnny (Ricardo Cortez, perhaps the most convincing sleaze-sack in Hollywood’s pre-war history), whose execution weapon of choice is a symbolically tiny pocketknife. Into the bar’s whirlwind of reeking souses comes crooning sailor Dan (Phillips Holmes, an early-‘30s McConaughey), who eventually decides to save Frankie from life as a slobbered sex toy. Both Twelvetrees and Holmes were short-lived and frankly dull headliners of the early-sound era; the film’s supporting battery, from Gleason to Slim Summerville to Franklin Pangborn, landing his only good screen punch, fare far better, and all end up embroiled in a climactic donnybrook that evokes Garnett’s time working on Roachian slapstick. But Garnett is not content, as many in the era were, to let the actors carry the show. The infamous technological burden of sound was lightened by 1930, and Garnett’s camera never stops trolling, swooping and pivoting, even throwing some on-location Havana shots onto back projection.
332/365: In This World (Michael Winterbottom, 2002) (YouTube)
Winterbottom set out to record the nightmarish but, today, utterly common voyage of illegal refugees, traveling with two uneducated Pashtun youths from freshly bombed Afghanistan to London. All-digital and slyly crafted, the movie is 90% raw experience — a relentless series of uncomfortable truck rides through low Asian wastelands — abetted by a stat-quoting BBC narrator and frequent animated maps. 13-year-old Jamal is the savvier of the two, already equipped with a sprinkling of English; 20-ish Enayat has the honest face of a toddler, and is wary enough to doubt every coyote and moneychanger they meet. Both are firsttime actors, but their integration into social landscapes is complete, whether they belong (in the refugee camps and Kurdish outlands) or not (Iran, Turkey). Little was rehearsed. Winterbottom uses the symptoms of documentary respectfully; his points of view are not consistently verite, but the textures are intimidatingly real. The odyssey happens before our eyes, as Jamal and Enayat transverse undeveloped hinterlands and negotiate one border after another before getting to Istanbul, and a sealed cargo box aboard a Mediterranean freighter that becomes something of a Calvary for all concerned. Little is developed dramatically — things just occur, and are presented (like a night scramble in the Turkish mountains, the digital photography taking on the creepy, halting minimalism of a struggling download) for their experiential torque. Winterbottom was intent on bare-bones realism, not poetry, and in the end, Winterbottom looks back on the Pakistani-border camps, where scores of destitute kids smile at the camera, their stories untold.
333/365: The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy, Amazon)
Truly a movie that requires no introduction, and a film school “classic” that survives as an unemphatic intersection between kammerspielfilm grittiness and Tudor-urban Expressionism, von Sternberg’s sole German film is more notorious for its legend-making than its experience as a narrative. But it remains a surprisingly sharp and deft morality tale, however ordinary it seems relative to, say, Lang’s M (one year later), or the baroque explosions of von Sternberg and Dietrich’s subsequent voyage to Hollywood. As the officious college prof lured by Marlene Dietrich’s slatternly nightclub tramp into the prideless life of a parasitic clown, Emil Jannings got to exercise his specialty once more: authoritative tyrants systematically hacked down to splinters. But Dietrich is the movie’s secret weapon: her amused eyes, open face and relaxed sensuality monopolize our sympathies. Far from the amoral vampire she’s been characterized as for decades, Dietrich’s Lola Lola is warm, fun and responsive — the film’s most beguiling image is her pleasantly amazed gape as Jannings’s “Unrath” impulsively ejects a john from her room. Lola Lola does marry the pompous hump, after all, and narratively five content years pass before the climactic Golgotha. Who decided this filly was vagina dentata personified?
334/365: Forty Shades of Blue (Ira Sachs, 2005) (Amazon)
A rare serving of adept regional indie cinema, Sachs’ film uses its Memphis milieu as setting and as character — the film is waist-deep in country-blues insouciance humming with nostalgia for itself and quietly resisting the onslaught of early-millennium consumer homogenization. At the story’s center is a family implosion fueled by Alan James (Rip Torn), a legendary record producer as tyrannical as he is magnetic, enjoying the autumnal awards-ceremony phase of his career. In his closest orbit coasts Laura (Dina Korzun), his Muscovite girlfriend, and at first blush the sort of bottle-blonde, fastidiously sexed-up trophy mate who walks so that her lank hair will properly catch the breeze. The mother of Alan’s 3-year-old son, Laura is a Lucy Jordan waiting to happen — we first see her searching for relevance in a department store’s perfume aisles, and Sachs shoots her so that she looks less like a confident fashion plate than a child lost in a new city. Korzun, unforgettable as the single-mom emigre in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort, is perfectly cast — Laura is pretty but also plain, dedicated to beauty-shop artifice yet fiercely intelligent enough to lend her every gesture a sense of dissatisfied helplessness. Her trial comes, more or less, with the unheralded return to Alan’s chintzy-but-opulent showbiz home of his grown son Michael (Darren Burrows), restively struggling whether he should divorce his wife now that she’s pregnant. Naturally, the two searchers fall in together under Alan’s radar. The film’s rhythms are seductively improv-y and off-kilter, dallying on passing details and often framing the actors as if they’re being surveilled by an invisible camera. The cast is uniformly genuine, with Torn making an utterly life-sized (as opposed to movie-sized) egomaniac, blustery and ass-kissed. But it’s Korzun’s film, and she is in complete control of her character, never divulging too much of the haunted woman under the studied facade of American hotsiness.
335/365: Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1946) (Criterion Channel, Amazon)
Rossellini’s inquiring sensibility is one of the medium’s most indispensable, and one of the few passionately dedicated to recording, and dissecting, history. Spectacle and theatrical drama didn’t interest him; rather, the projection of the filmmaking’s reality was the “truth” he sought to capture, in a way that paved the way for Godard and more acutely presaged the manner of Kiarostami. This film, the middle of a so-called “war trilogy” (between Rome Open City and Germany Year Zero), and which critic David Thomson called “the truest Second World War movie,” may be Rossellini’s masterpiece, except that it doesn’t seem so on its surfaces, which begin rough and stilted, and eventually smooth out into a seething eloquence. Structurally, it’s an innovative triumph: an omnibus of stories that begins with the Allied forces landing in Sicily, and, sequence by sequence, climbing their way up the peninsula and liberating the country, until they’re in the Po Valley. Paisan is best considered as a northward hunt for ambivalences, a dogged search for moments, peoples and landscapes that confound accepted notions; time and again, the liberating forces and the Italians, who harbor their own post-Fascist shame, meet and begrudgingly renegotiate their world together. It’s the first war film that tilts away from outrage, and toward wondering what life will be like when peace settles.
336/365: Topsy-Turvy (Mike Leigh, 1999) (Criterion Channel, Amazon)
A consistently delightful, superbly timed and impeccably staged wedge of Brit pop history, Leigh’s movie is rather un-Leigh-like: it was his first that wasn’t a contemporary meltdown semi-comedies set amongst Brit working classers. This movie jumps back more than a hundred years to the heyday of operetta maestros Gilbert and Sullivan, and the upshot is expansive, wise, ingenious and performed within an inch of its life. The story at first steps midway into the careers of Britain’s most hosannaed pair of musical artistes, as they weather the mediocre reception of Princess Ida and come to an impasse when, suffering a battery of ailments and an artistic depression, Sullivan (Allan Corduner) decides that light musical theater is no longer in his future. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) sees little wrong with the preposterous scenario he’s delivered, and the conflict remains at a stalemate until Mrs. Gilbert (Lesley Manville) drags him out to a Japanese exposition and sparks the idea for what becomes The Mikado. From there, Leigh’s scenario branches out to encompass dozens of other characters, most of them employed at the Savoy Theater where G & S are contracted, and the film focuses on the tough and unusual work of staging an operetta: costuming, rehearsing and soothing finicky actors (Timothy Spall, Martin Savage, Kevin McKidd), preparing the orchestra, choreographing the action, etc. Primary among the film’s many pleasures is Broadbent, whose belchy-plummy way with stinging dialogue is unparalleled. But the entire cast is entrancing — few films feel as genuinely inhabited as this one. One long rehearsal scene, between Gilbert and three actors, is symptomatic: there to deliver nothing less or more than the pleasures, rhythms and agonies of theatrical rehearsal, it’s a tour de force of writing and perfectly controlled performance.
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, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47
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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