Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 5
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
29/365: Cosmic Voyage (Vasili Zhuravylov, 1936) (YouTube)
A genuinely obscure silent-Soviet artifact not mentioned in any genre study or reference book, Zhuravylov’s almost unbearably quaint space-age lark is notable for many things, first being its status as the only film to which pioneering rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky lent technical assistance. The film’s credits suggest it’s adapted from Tsiolkovsky’s 1893 novel On the Moon, but it’s more accurately derived from Fritz Lang’s Woman on the Moon (1929), down to the who’s-boarding-the-rocket intrigue and the make-up of the resulting ensemble (an old scientist, a blonde and a precocious young stowaway boy launch for the Moon). But at roughly one-third the length, Zhuravylov’s film is by far the breezier affair, as much a result of the sheer daydreaminess of Soviet cinema (relatively to the monolithic, depressive moralism of pre-Socialism German film) as of running time. Thanks to the implementation of Tsiolkovsky’s astronautic calculations, it’s also the first semi-accurate cinematic depiction of space travel, but Fyodor Krasne’s entrancing Starewicz-style stop-motion animation, which has tiny animated cosmonauts running and leaping weightlessly across a rocky tabletop Moon surface, takes us to another plane — to where we realize how movies can embody the imaginative play of children better than any other medium. (In fact, production was initiated after a request by the Komsomol, the USSR’s Communist youth league, for more movies to be made for kids.) For all of its Rodochenko-esque diagonals and spectacular miniatures, what this ditty delivers today is the delicate esprit of Soviet hopefulness, the culture’s teary, exuberant utopianism. It’s easy to be terribly moved by the films’ naked emotionalism, particularly since it expresses not necessarily a filmmaker’s aesthetic, but an entire hornswoggled country’s rueful agony and fantasized ecstacy.
30/365: Hotel Harabati (Brice Cauvin, 2006) (Amazon Prime)
This ticklish and ambiguous post-9/11 portrait of dissolution posits a young husband and wife (Helen Filliere and Laurent Lucas, who in the Aughts was an axiomatic James Stewart of absurd domestic cataclysm), who are a day away from a trip to Venice. But they find an Arab’s valise filled with foreign money first — and, after an ellipsis, we see they never made it to Italy and we’re never told why. When everyone asks, they begin fabricating; the tiny white lies metastasize and paranoias spawn, and then actual photos from the fictional trip come back from the lab. In due time, their tidy Parisian existence — job, home, parenthood, marriage, friendships, sanity — harrowingly begins to disintegrate. Like many anxious French films of the era, Cauvin’s sings the body enigmatic; just as his characters are adrift in the disarray of what they’d thought were orderly, controlled lives, we get only misfitting pieces of “what happened,” itself a questionable quantity for all concerned. Formally the film is scrupulously realistic in its hustle-bustle, French-accidental-framing way, making sure we’re never anchored to the ground and helping to therein muster the pathologies of existentialist fiction and theatre (Kafka, Beckett, Ionesco, etc.) and the spectre of the horror film. What’s really going on? Readable in a myriad of metaphoric ways, the film seamlessly evokes modern crises of middle-class instability and marital insecurity with blithely cynical air.
31/365: The Safety of Objects (Rose Troche, 2001) (Amazon Prime)
An expertly constructed, neglected female-helmed indie, derived from A.M. Homes’s celebrated collection of astoundingly creepy short stories, that plunges into four suburban families whose barely repressed troubles all center around a single devastating — but utterly common and mundane — incident. Homes’s stories are only tenuously connected; it was Troche who sutured them together into a seamless whole, starting with Glenn Close’s meticulous mom, doting over a comatose son (Joshua Jackson) at the expense of her teenage daughter (Jessica Campbell), who harbors seething resentment toward a neighboring single mom (Patricia Clarkson), whose young, slightly androgynous daughter (Kristen Stewart) becomes preyed upon by the local handyman (Tim Olyphant), who turns out to be far from the scavenging pervert we imagine him to be. A hotshot lawyer on the block (Dermot Mulroney) gets passed over at work and, before he knows it, he falls off the grid and begins loitering at the mall; the son of another mom (Mary Kay Place) is having an intense love affair with his sister’s Barbie doll. In fact, none of the characters turn out the way we think they will, and their relationships are all real-life complex. Humane, attentive to details, and generous with actors that didn’t always get this type of open road to drive on, the movie does what indies are supposed to do — dare to defy our expectations and mix up our preliminary judgments, and do it with a grown-up, expertly evoked human pulse.
32/365: Adua and Her Friends (Antonio Pietrangeli, 1960) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
A conscientiously tawdry post-neo-realism artifact that saw wide global release in the ’60s and then was promptly forgotten, Pietrangeli’s film opens like a spaghetti noir, on the nightened Roman streets inhabited by riff-raff, and in a grubby brothel on the eve of its closure, thanks to a new postwar law. There we meet the chin-out sassiness of four sisters in the craft: tough Adua (Simone Signoret), dim hotsy Lolita (Sandra Milo), unbalanced Marilina (Emmanuelle Riva) and mousey Milly (Gina Rovere), all of whom decide to evade the long-term eventualities of whoredom and instead pool their resources to open a country trattoria in the ruins of a cavernous villa. Of course the girls face heinous problems, as their past follows them into the sunshine, and their license to operate is funded by a shady operative who demands a pimp’s share of their upstairs action. (Refreshing as always, Marcello Mastroianni shows up, irrelevantly, as a tangential love interest for Signoret’s bullish manhater.) The film is filthy with rich atmosphere, roving camera inquisitiveness, and flat-out breathtaking cinematography, including what may be the loveliest passage in DP Armando Nunnuzzi’s long and varied career: Rovere’s soured maiden wandering out into the hillsides at dusk, where a castle looms in the middle ground, and fireflies swoop in the grass. The story rolls inevitably as tragedy, one that slowly, broadly, winds around to a crushing coda that keeps faith with the New Wave era’s sense of hard-bitten realism and outcast pathos.
33/365: Solaris (Steven Soderbergh, 2002) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Google Play)
You have to hand it to Soderbergh for the catapulting chutzpah displayed in daring to remake the Tarkovsky film — he was destined to disappoint both mainstream multiplex-goers and the devoted fans of Russian art-film. Who cares: this unpopular brooder manages to be a searching, arresting and thoughtful work on its own, fully invested in using, as Tarkovsky always did, sci-fi stuff as powerhouse metaphor. The story’s primary vehicle, from a novel by Polish sci-fi master Stanislaw Lem, is a planet comprised entirely of a massive ocean which spontaneously manifests the memories of whomever’s nearby — as in, the crew of the orbiting space station. George Clooney’s psychologist-investigator shows up to find out why the station’s staff has seemingly gone AWOL, only to find each (Viola Davis and Jeremy Davies in knockout performances) in a state of mysterious meltdown. What’s worse is the fact that Clooney is himself a recent widower, who’s still grieving for his suicidal wife (Natasha McElhone), and so in due course she matter-of-factly appears in bed next to him in the morning. What ensues is a wrenching tribulation of marital frustration and loss, with enough metaphysical conundrums to choke an existentialist philosopher. As in, if this gorgeous woman isn’t Clooney’s wife, who is she? Is she human? Will history play itself out the same way, and why wouldn’t it? Soderbergh cashed in his Erin Brockovich-Traffic-Ocean’s Eleven chips for this utterly heartfelt movie, and made them count; it might be his best film.
34/365: Amores Perros (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, 2000) (Hoopla, Vudu, Tubi, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
This is where Inarritu came from, an epically long, savage Mexican tragicomedy revolving around a heart-stopping car wreck and the fallout of dog-fighting (though none of the battling canines were hurt, or hurt much). Imported movies at the turn of the millennium didn’t get much funkier than this rambling, nasty, heart-attack launch, whose pivotal vehicular collision, which is seen during the movie from three points of view and which serves as the flight pad for three interconnecting stories of depravity, greed, pettiness, ignorance and cruelty, is only modern cinema’s most appalling road trauma. The three stories track along economic lines: a young Mexicano with a champion pit bull and a love for his battered, pregnant sister-in-law, struggles to make a killing on one last fight; an adulterous soap opera glamour queen emerges from the aforementioned smash-up in a wheelchair, going slowly crazy in her and her lover’s new apartment as her beloved poodle battles rats beneath the floorboards; and a disheveled, ex-Sandinista rogue assassin — a mystery figure who straddles both class extremes — takes on one last corporate hit as he searches for his long-estranged adult daughter and becomes the unassuming custodian of the young Mexicano’s killer hound. Throughout the mayhem, Inarritu shoots the movie with handheld anxiety, and cuts it like a bad dream.
35/365: White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932) (YouTube, PublicDomainMovie.net, Amazon Prime)
This classic tomb mushroom of a movie is the fustiest of the early ’30s horror-cycle classics, a Haiti-set, backlot-shot somnambulism in which the utterly bland Madge Bellamy, upon whom every man in sight has designs, is zombified by voodoo master/sugar mill owner Bela Lugosi. It is a film so independently produced that its disconnected, webby, comatose atmosphere not only reflects its subject acutely but limns an accidental and secret microworld like no other. It’s largely a function of the early-talkie technology — if the movie had been made five years later, it would have no longer appeared to have been a mystery we’d found under a rock. As it is, we’re presented with a moldy, calcified, black-&-gray neverworld where wide-eyed zombies lurch, people talk very slowly, gaping reaction shots last aeons, castles and night skies are hand-crafted (the most transparently painted matte paintings in the history of matte paintings), gothic style reigns (even in Haiti), and shadows huddle in every corner. Perhaps one needs to love this particular and semi-secret movie space — to have a jones for its atmospherics, a yen to visit its odd patch of earth, its gargoyled hallways and dark hills. Can one watch, and rewatch, White Zombie any other way? (Take, as extra bonus points, what might be the oddest early-talkie two-seconds of film ever, a narrative moment no one has, to our knowledge, ever noticed it: at one late moment, the zombified Bellamy is being compelled to knife her knocked-out beau, when a hand in a black cloak appears above her from behind a nearby doorjamb and stays her hand, preventing her. What was that? No explanation is offered; whose hand this was, or whether it was meant to be an analog bit of subconscious symbolism the producers forgot to use a special effect on, we’ll never know. Just a hand, in a black cloak. The mystery continues.)
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4
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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