Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 7
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
43/365: Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015) (Google Play, Amazon Prime)
The one-man meta-New Wave from Thailand, Weerasethakul may be the most original working filmmaker alive, which is one way of saying that his gentle, ironic, magical-realist idyls are often radically different from both mainstream multiplex fare and Euro-Asian “art films” as we think of them. This late work is a poetic tissue of tropical moments, haunted by the irrepressible past. The setting is a country hospital set up inside an old school — and, we learn, atop an ancient burial ground for Thai kings. Occupying the beds are dozens of young soldiers beset by sleeping sickness, which does not prevent them from spontaneously waking and then passing out again, mustering erections, or having their dreams plumbed by a young psychic. Volunteering at the hospital is an aging woman on crutches (the filmmaker’s go-to favorite, Jenjira Pongpas Widner, playing herself in almost every way), who bonds with one sleeping soldier and accompanies him when he wakes into the world outside. Are dead souls keeping the soldiers dozing? The sleepers are equipped in their beds with therapeutic columns of changing light; later in the film, entire scenes start to change color, too, suggesting that we’re in a dream that has infected reality. Which of course we are. Throughout, the question is what form recent and ancient history takes in the present, ranging from psychic memories of demolished palaces to a playground made of dinosaurs to tsunami rings on a banyan tree. Goddesses appear, looking just like pretty Thai girls, at picnic tables outside. The tenderness of the present moment, however bizarre and bewitching it may be, is the insistent meat of the matter, in fine Buddhist tradition. “Life is like candlelight,” someone says deep in, and it feels just about right.
44/365: Hallelujah the Hills (Adolfas Mekas, 1963) (Fandor, Amazon Prime)
Subtitled “a romance,” this madcap absurdity from the nascent days of the New American Cinema, the most renowned, and long-unseen, feature helmed by Jonas Mekas’ younger brother, is a signature schpritz of its carefree, rule-busting, filmmaking-as-goof-off era, a sort of film that reveled in the child-like play and improvised experimentalism of quasi-amateur production, as only 60s films could ever. Naively staged like an accidental silent slapstick, the film trails after two buddies (art world gadfly/photographer Peter Beard and then-budding artist Marty Greenbaum) who nearly kill themselves driving a Jeep through the forest while hunting — a flash-forward, we learn, the resulting bender after the two men discover they have for years been courting the same Vermont girl (played, in a deft move, by two actresses, Peggy Steffans and Sheila Finn). That’s it for straight narrative — pratfalls, dress-up (pirates, clowns), horsing around, dance routines, flashbacks within flashbacks, fourth-wall demolition, memories-as-movies, nude romping in the snow, wedges of Way Down East, schtick lifted from W.C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy, anything at all that Mekas and his cast (which includes, briefly, Taylor Mead, Ed Emshwiller, and three of Emsh’s kids) could think of that might be fun. Juvenile esprit and postmod savvy entwine effortlessly. Wearing its of-the-moment Godardian mantle as lightly as could be (and JLG was a fan, lauding Hills in Cahiers du cinema as “pure invention”), Mekas’ film was a hit wherever it went, garnering hosannas at Cannes and the first New York Film Festival, and playing in Manhattan for months. Always absurdly scarce on video, it’s a prize ingredient in the mad stew of the New Wave era, and a welcome chance to restore Mekas’ name alongside his bro’s.
45/365: About Elly (Asghar Farhadi, 2009) (Kanopy, Vudu, YouTube)
If you’ve been jumper-cabled by A Separation (2011), you’re well aware of this Iranian filmmaker’s formidable way with pure narrative torque; Farhadi’s movies are adult, sharp iron maidens of storytelling emotion. This earlier film is another oratorio of social catastrophe, and the scenario couldn’t be simpler: a group of upper-middle-class grown college friends, with sisters and spouses and young children, convene on a rented beach spot for a vacation. Immediately amid the in-joke joshing and high spirits we glean evidence of how they dynamic has survived — Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani), the glamour puss among them, is the alpha girl, the organizer and busybody, a reality of which her older husband Amir (Mani Haghighi) is quite wary. Ahmad (Shabab Hosseini) is the single man on the premises, having returned from Germany after a painful divorce. At Sepideh’s urging, a fourth woman is present, Elly (Taraneh Alidousti), single and lovely and unknown to the others. She remains somewhat distant, making phone calls and checking her watch, insisting she can stay only one night, and then lightning strikes: while left alone on the beach with Elly, one of the children nearly drown, in a scene shot and edited like a heart attack. The boy survives, but when everyone turns around, they find that Elly has disappeared. The search for her — did she drown, or did she leave? — is frantic and clotted with unknowables. It’s also, in Iran, a nest of troublesome issues. For one thing, the group learns from a shattered Sepideh, Elly was tangled in an unhappy engagement, leaving them with the awareness that the entire trip so far had, under Sharia law, compromised her virtue. One car ride alone with Ahmad was enough to destroy her reputation. Layers of lies get uncovered, and then grow like bacteria, compromising almost everybody. The mystery of the movie emanates from cultural self-deception, and what a ruinous mismatch Islamic norms make with 21st century progressive civilization. But it’s still about seven people in a beach house, confronting how the modern, educated, secular people they thought they were remain trapped in the past, in a society they cannot pretend they’re not a part of.
46/365: Marjoe (Sarah Kernochan & Howard Smith, 1972) (SundanceNow, Amazon Prime)
Crazed evangelism, in 1972, was enough of an eye-opening sensation to make news of this doc and and Oscar winners of its creators; then, presidents did not hold prayer meetings in the White House, and 24-hour evangelical TV stations did not broadcast coast to coast. Honest-to-God Pentecostals were a subcultural stratum educated documentary-watchers had never seen before, and the movie is frank about its mondo-Jesus perspective, gazing upon the howlers, shakers, tongue-speakers and weepers as if they were the leaf-clothed Liawep “lost tribe” of Papua New Guinea. The focus, Marjoe Gortner, became afterwards something of a quasi-celebrity icon: notorious in mid-century as the “world’s youngest ordained minister,” Gortner returned to preaching in the late ’60s as a simple source of easy shuck money. (From there, he became a recording artist and B-movie actor specializing in rapists and psychos; in 1976 he was battling fake giant rats in a film version of Wells’s The Food of the Gods.) Gortner’s confessional participation in this movie is a crucial matter: lookin’ to get out, Gortner admits he’s a fraud and atheist, and derisively briefs the film crew on the meetings’ conservative norms and codes before they commence. When the holy-rolling is in full swing, only the crowds of middle-American spirit-receivers are oblivious to Gortner’s hucksterism. The old promotional footage of Gortner and his mom (who trained him, abusively, from toddlerhood in the art of Christian crowd-madness) has an eerie, Ed Woodian mutant aura, but in the Nixon-era present he is self-disgusted enough to go public and therein insure his departure from the lifestyle for good — but was he an insincere aberration, or are evangelists all conmen? Was Marjoe the American future?
47/365: Lucky Star (Frank Borzage, 1929) (YouTube)
This bewitching late silent, recently restored, is a kind of culmination of the Murnau-Fox aesthetic; Borzage took the dreamy, multi-layered Sunrise palette and infused it with human complexity and romantic seriousness. Set in the South, the store reinvents popular co-stars Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell: Gaynor is a wild-child country girl, Farrell is a linesman gone to war and returned in a wheelchair, and the struggle is centered on who she should choose for a husband: her greedy mother’s choice of Guinn “Big Boy” Williams’s lying pig or Farrell’s no-sun-also-rising cripple. But of course, in the Sunrise paradigm, the films’ humanist textures are what catch your breath, as well as the dream-borne visual passages that could rival Murnau’s, as in the expansive opening, which evokes miles of countryside in the manner of the Hudson River School of painting, romanticist and chaotic, all on a studio set. Borzage was Hollywood’s premier romanticist, and this film goes cosmic in its keening desire; he was also one of the best actors’ directors. Gaynor’s huge eyes are the obvious trump card here, enabling her to register a Streepian cascade of visible reactions and ideas almost without moving a muscle. (Her role is also a headstrong, active agents in her own story, making moral decisions and changing the course of personal history, which is more than could be said for her wife in Sunrise.) Farrell is just as much a surprise, however, and here is revealed to be maybe the most underrated, and under-remembered, leading man in Hollywood history.
48/365: Heli (Amat Escalante, 2013) (Vudu, Vimeo, BFI Player, Amazon Prime)
A dead-eyed, lyrical art film about Mexican narcoculture that kicks you in the throat, in a fearless style that dovetails poetic resonance and unblinking horror. Escalante won Best Director at Cannes for this, and he tells you how it’s going to be with the first composition: looking down at two bludgeoned and duct-taped young men unconscious in a truckbed, boot on face, from which the camera gradually pivots up over them and dollies forward, into the cab, gazing through the windshield at the road and the late afternoon sun. (One of the victims is immediately lynched off a bridge and left swinging — receding in the distance as we drive away.) Then it’s a flashback, into the mild domestic world of Heli (Armando Espitia), a twentysomething factory worker living with his disinterested young wife and baby, his aging father, and his 12-year-old sister Estela (Andrea Vergara). The narrative, like an avalanche that begins with falling pebbles, begins to build, starting with the ungainly and barely pubertal Estela’s covert romance with Beto (Juan Eduardo Palacios), a horny 17-year-old police cadet-in-training. Mountains of seized drugs get ceremoniously burned at press conferences, but Beto looks to impress his dimly aware senorita by stealing a junkyard stash for himself — hiding it in Heli’s rooftop water tank, and thereby precipitating a rain of cartel mayhem. The fallout, like the criminal reality, abides by no rules, and Heli has a handful of Holy Crap moments few casual American filmgoers will be prepared for. Escalante masters the vibe by being both meticulously realist (he uses digitals, as we know from his earlier film Los Bastardos, but you can’t see them) and coolly observational, using all non-pro actors that give the movie a sense of reserve and disconnection veering into ghastly comedy.
49/365: Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki,1967) (Criterion Channel, Amazon Prime)
Nothing quite stings the throat and refreshes the nasal cavities like a Seijun Suzuki film, each typically a voguing cataract of ironic cruelty, surreal juxtapositions, inappropriate bursts of raw color, abrupt dolly shots, lovely ugliness, raving performances, and jump-cut epilepsy. Of the lunatics that ran the asylum of the Japanese New Wave, Suzuki was the most proudly pulpy, but in such a self-regarding, quasi-Fullerian/Godardian way that the man’s luridly hilarious films, in a sea of outlandish Japanese hyperbole, are always unmistakably his. His disgust with orthodoxy radiates like desert heat from his movies, the crime narratives of which are merely cheap suits worn on the wacky path to self-destruction. This is his last Nikkatsu scorcher, famous for being so irrational and impressionistic that the fed-up studio suits finally fired the filmmaker (a popular protest and lawsuit ensued; Suzuki won damages, but his career sputtered). Branded, in fact, is close to being a pure ideogram movie; every sex-&-death fever-spike image-idea that ever haunted the postwar Japanese brainpan is here in close to vodkal form, distilling down its gestalt — of silk-suited Joe Shisido + naked dames good and evil + guns + fetishistic sex + uncorked modernist despair — to iconic fragments and compositional obliqueness. Shishido’s career hitman, set up for a fall and obsessed with being Number One in some classically Suzukian assassin register, holds this crazy daydream together, but the unsolved mysteries, vague conspiracies, unmotivated cutaways to empty spaces and montage sutures that border on free-associative threaten in any given moment toward implosion. It might be the most self-knowingly rebellious of New Wave films, or merely a mega-Fuller on dexies, a rocket from a fresh and unpredictable world.
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
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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