Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 50
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
344/365: The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy, Vudu, Google Play, Amazon)
This sardonic Italian film blasts off from its very first plunge into the social stew of contemporary Rome, conscientiously reinventing Fellini’s La Dolce Vita for the 21st century and nailing the chattering leisure class of the city to the wall for all time. There’s no resisting the film’s relentless boogie-woogie party vibe, its tumultuous visual banquet, its unpredictable sense of switchblade satire, its fool’s-parade of modern grotesques, or its river of startling melancholy, turning from a wary trickle to a flashflood by film’s end. Jep (Italian everyman Toni Servillo) is our guide through this everything-old-is-new-and-old-again orgy; he’s a classic high society pilot fish, a writer with an inflated reputation more concerned, even as his 65th birthday comes and goes, with staying up all night at the right parties and cynically occupying the sunset edge of a civilization in decline. Servillo is a master of self-possessed absurdity, and Jep is a fascinating creation, a brainy, pink-jacket hedonist in a desperately self-anesthetizing Gomorrah who thought he might live forever and is only now realizing how evanescent he and his empty lifestyle actually are. Rancid fun are made of Marina Abramovic, Mother Teresa, the Vatican, high art, old money and the Mob. So rambunctious and densely inhabited it’s a movie you visit, not merely watch, The Great Beauty is also one of the greatest films about modern social dissolution, an epic art-film subgenre that may well have begun with Fellini’s classic more than a half-century ago, and never gets old.
345/365: Fallen Angels (Wong Kar-wai, 1995) (Criterion Channel, Amazon, Asian-Movies-Online)
Our modern Whitman of romantic urban rue, Wong has been nothing if not consistent, and this, his fifth film, is nearly a remake, or a continuation, of Chungking Express (down to the outdated cans of pineapple), transforming that film’s strange bifurcated structure into a rambunctious helix of story threads, again dallying in the tight corners of contemporary Hong Kong with crazy love, eccentric destiny and Jean-Pierre Melville-style proto-noir. The first romantic thread involve an embittered hitman (Leon Lai), whose life migrates anonymously from job to job as proscribed by the Agent (Michele Reis), an efficient gal Friday who sets up his temporary pads, does the paperwork, pays him and is, secretly, in love with him. The second centers on Zhiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a mute and slightly deranged ex-con whose ersatz living is made by breaking into shops after closing and maniacally compelling reluctant customers to buy from him. Zhiwu stumbles upon Cherry (Charlie Young), a broken-hearted, motormouthed club chick who enlists Zhiwu in finding the boyfriend who dumped her and exacting revenge. These engaging and often hilarious tales criss-cross at several points, especially in the end, but there are other lyrical avenues as well, none as poignant as Zhiwu getting his hands on a video camera and recording his father before the ailing man’s death. More than any other filmmaker, Wong’s films are suffused with the elan and sadness of being poised on the edge of the millennium, or at least on the rim of a quickly spinning and quickly shrinking globe. However rooted in Hong Kong, Wong’s films all taste the epochal sourness of cultural internationalism, in which home is everywhere and nowhere is home.
346/365: The 317th Platoon (Pierre Schoendoerffer, 1965) (Apple TV, Vimeo, Yidio, Amazon)
Famously one of the very first films about the Second Indochina War, this pioneering film was based on Schoendoerffer’s novel, which in turns was based on his time serving as a cameraman in the century’s favorite pointless war, in the early ’50s leading up to the battle of Dien Bien Phu. Shot in Cambodia by Raoul Coutard with a Urusevkian sheen of white foliage and brooding skies, it’s an assiduous, happenstantial odyssey, following a small platoon (a few French officers, lead by Jacques Perrin and ever-watchful Bruno Cremer, leading dozens of luckless Laotians), fleeing through the Cambodian jungle after being commanded to abandon their base during the famous siege. Schoendoerffer was dedicated to realism, so that the battles and landscapes are unsensationalized, sometimes shot from a documentary-like distance, and while the characters are seasoned at reading signs and noises in the wilderness, they know very little about what’s ahead, and therefore so do we. The narrative is calmly stripped down — death, death, and more death — while the sweaty French protagonists matter-of-factly start taking opium to get them through the ordeal. Even a visual like a procession of elephants carrying wounded through the jungle is undersold; Schoendoerffer makes little effort to “make us feel” the suffering, his program leaning toward the-way-it-was realism in favor of cinematic zest. The result is single-minded and pungent and wholly unromantic about warfare, but also politically neutral — there’s little energy spent critiquing French colonialism, or the second-class status awarded the Laotians and Cambodians, as you might expect from a vet, in 1965. The bind of colonialistic power, fueled by expendable bodies, is implicit, but the tense banality of the characters’ predicament also leaves much unsaid.
347/365: Faust (Jan Svankmajer, 1994) (Criterion Channel, EasternEuropeanMovies)
Spiritual grandad to the Quays, the only living filmmaker who would think to have a Lewis Carroll rabbit smear butter into an open pocket watch, and who still, in the 90s, proclaimed himself a “militant surrealist,” Svankmajer made his reputation on shorts, but this was his his second feature, set in contemporary Prague and taking its titular subject seriously, with the cited texts running through Marlowe, Goethe and Gonoud, while irreverently playing with our expectations Godard-style. Svankmajer isn’t interested in the morality of this most moralistic of legends; rather, he takes it as a satiric jab at the shrugging opportunism of post-Soviet East Europe. The primary tensions are to be found between Prague’s past and what it is becoming; at one point, Faust finds a rusty key inside of a dumpling he’s eating. The past won’t die, and many of the film’s perambulating figures are antique examples of Czech puppetry. Faust himself is human (played by sleepy-eyed Czech vet Petr Cepek), drawn into his famous bargain and into the texts of all the past Fausts, simply by being given a mysterious map, which leads him through a typically Svankmajerian urban maze, and to a theater, where he gamely recites from Goethe and sings from Gonoud. Soon, the alchemist’s milieu becomes realer than the theater, and Mephisto plays his games with the unlucky pilgrim. Hell is suggested with a minimum of pomp; a clay infant rapidly ages into a skull, fruit turns maggoty in blink of an eye, day changes to night when Faust cracks open an egg he finds baked into a loaf of bread. In an innocent, funky way the Quays could never recapture even if they wanted to, Svankmajer’s films do seem medieval, the dust-covered work of a 14th century puppeteer somehow captured on film before film existed.
348/365: The Strange Woman (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1946) (Tubi, Philo, Sling TV, Amazon, YouTube, Pluto TV)
Ostensibly in synopsis a cheapjack heartless-heroine women’s melodrama in the Gone with the Wind mold, with Wellesian overtones, this mid-career Ulmer saga is one of the straightest films the beloved Skid Row itinerant ever made, and yet for all of its grand gestures towards dramatic orthodoxy it remains a secretive and almost disturbed film, a classically Ulmerian travail of delusional narrative, suggested psychopathy, and creepy disconnection. Hedy Lamarr is the early-1800s Maine shipping town wild child scandalizing the elders with sailor liaisons, until her alcoholic father dies and she is adopted, and then married, by avuncular shopkeeper Gene Lockhart. From there, the fully adult Jenny schemes to subvert her husband with his son — smitten ne’er-do-well Louis Hayward (who is closer to lizardy, self-loathing dissolution here than ever). The machinations behind the hussy’s eyes are never made totally clear; the young lovers share a Hitchcockian moment of dread when they realize that Lockhart’s near-death experience is just that, but when it’s followed eventually by the old man’s demise, the new widow inexplicably shuts the son out, sending him off on a suicidal bender. George Sanders then manifests, as a logging-camp manager next in line to fall under the woman’s spell. Throughout, Ulmer compresses his shadowy studio interiors like vises around his characters, and often goes for compositions — like the bizarre image of Lamarr swaddled in an enormous bed, only her sideways face showing like a radiant toddler, surrounded by concerned “adults” — that imbue the film with a disarming weirdness, suggesting there’s something going on that we’re not privy to. In the middle of the story, the unpoliced Maine town in the background erupts into rioting and Gomorrah decadence for mysterious reasons; Jenny herself is so conflicted between using men and actually loving them that she seems genuinely bipolar. None of this may be intentional, by just the familiar byproduct in Ulmer’s oeuvre of the battle against constrained budgets and schedules forcing the man’s peculiar instincts about behavior, milieu and short-cut storytelling onto celluloid.
349/365: Wrong Move (Wim Wenders, 1975) (Criterion Channel, Kanopy, YouTube, Amazon)
The middle film of Wenders’ road movie trilogy from the ’70s, nestled between Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1976), this New Waver is the artsiest anti-movie of the pack. In those heady days Wenders was a premier post-Antonionian, using aimless road travel as a metaphor for film time, and kicking up an existentialist storm of wheel-spinning hipster coolness. This dyspeptic amble is adapted (by novelist Peter Handke) from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, and though it conscientiously evokes the book’s self-actualizing Romantic fever, the film itself is as unRomantic as a train ride to nowhere. Wenders regular Rudiger Volger is Wilhelm, a moody, alienated would-be writer who whimsically leaves home and travels across Germany (and vertically, from the Rhine to the Zugspitze mountain peak), idly searching for a moment when he might “become.” He never comes close, instead falling in with an actress (Hanna Schygulla), an itinerant father and daughter (Hans Christian Blech, an occasionally nude 14-year-old Nastassja Kinski) and a portly poet wannabe (Peter Kern). The five wander, dawdle, drive, encounter a suicidal industrialist, bore each other with recounted dreams, and end up back in the city, their collective “journey” — the aim of which was never articulated — dissolving into stasis and separation. A bitter, deadpan parody of all things Romantic, Wenders’ film is also so ironic about its own emptiness that it ends up being something pure: a pop dirge about how never sitting still may be the only answer to meaninglessness.
350/365: Post Mortem (Pablo Larrain, 2010) (Ovid, Kanopy, Amazon)
Outside of documentarian Patricio Guzman’s lifelong inquiry of outrage, this might be the most corrosive film ever made about life during the Pinochet regime. Chile’s own dark ages, the sixteen years of Pinochet’s iron-man reign immediately became notorious for political killings and disappearings, but in the decades since it has become paradigmatic of a secret fact present in most if not all non-Communist dictatorships: that a certain percentage of the population is perfectly happy with autocracy, thank you. Like Larrain’s first film, Tony Manero (2008), this grim launch is framed as an asocial character study, starring Alfredo Castro as the records clerk in a Santiago morgue, a blank nowhere man incapable of responding to the death and suffering that passes by him everyday. It’s an affect that’ll be both an advantage and a curse once the 1973 Pinochet coup comes — the job becomes a nightmare once the new military rulers enlist him and his colleagues into assisting them with the ever-increasing death toll. Meantime, his obsession with a burlesque dancer on his street grows more intense when she is “disappeared” — like virtually everyone else in the neighborhood. The simple narrative situation concocted by Larrain closes like an iron maiden on Castro’s zombified municipal worker, who like so much of Chile’s middle class just wants to look the other way, and yet the corpses mount. Larrain’s camera style is stolid and rigorous, not allowing you to look away at the surreal horrors.
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, 48, 49
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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