Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 9
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
57/365: Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
A still-underseen visionary fable about our uneasy relationship with television, Ross’s fantasia accepts TV for what it has always been — a comforting parallel universe in which there are no real problems, no accidents, no risks, no sex. The simple story is brilliantly imagined: a 90s teenage brother and sister — Tobey Maguire’s shy Nick at Night addict and Reese Witherspoon’s selfish high school slut — encounter an otherworldly cable repairman (Don Knotts) who gets them physically sucked into a rerun marathon of a colorless 50s sitcom called Pleasantville. Once trapped in the B&W, idealized TV universe, the two of them face off against the relentless cheer of their new parents (Joan Allen and William H. Macy), the placid lack of messiness or failure (basketballs, regardless of where you throw them in the gym, always score), the strange fact that the bathrooms have no toilets and the town’s roads all run in circles. Then something remarkable happens: thanks to Jennifer and David, Pleasantville itself begins to change. Jennifer starts screwing the aw-shucks basketball-team captain in the front seat of his sportster (“Something’s happening to me!” he sputters; “That’s supposed to happen,” she says, looking into his lap. “It is?!” he moans), and suddenly things begin to blossom with real, Technicolor colors. David panics, fearing the collapse of the entire Pleasantville universe, but soon it’s plain that change is inevitable, as discomfiting as it may seem to Pleasantvillites. The introduction of queen-sized beds is a town scandal, the empty library books begin to fill in, lusty teenagers begin to blossom into full-color, and the unvaried routine of Pleasantville life begins to fall hilariously apart. The money scene here is when Mom, who has apparently never had sex, asks the seasoned daughter what goes on at Lover’s Lane, and the ensuing blunt birds-&-bees talk culminates in a masturbation lesson that Mom puts to use that night, in her bath. As she hits orgasm in the color-blooming bathroom, the elm tree outside bursts into flames. It’s a blazingly clever comedy that’s also startlingly poetic, neatly taking on American daydreamism in all of its ridiculous forms — even racism, once the terrified town elders declare war on the “coloreds.” Wise beyond its industry, the movie actually embraces the corruption of innocence and the sometimes inevitable collapse of the hallowed American family unit.
58/365: Long Day’s Journey into Night (Sidney Lumet, 1962) (Archive.org, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Eugene O’Neill’s epic autobiographical hell-plunge into family necrosis has its definitive manifestation here, shot by young TV vet Lumet at the height of both the American theater’s so-called Golden Age, and the postwar explosion of hyperventilating theatrical mega-drama on TV (often live) and on film. In this claustrophobic landscape of Rod Steigers, Lee J. Cobbs, Geraldine Pages and Sidney Poitiers, the scenery and each others’ flesh was all there was for lunch, and the combustible expressiveness of contemporaneous Italian and British films proved to be mild by comparison. In this four-person torture-chamber-play, the O’Neill family, pretty closely evoked, is driven toward static zombiehood by an unholy quadrangle of afflictions: morphine addiction, alcoholism, consumption, and a generalized grief for opportunities lost and yet to be unattained. It’s been dubbed the playwright’s masterpiece (the film bears no screenwriter credit, using the play as it was written), partly because it’s so close to the bone: Jason Robards is the life-hating boozehound son Jamie, whose real-life counterpart did drink himself to death decades before the play was written; Katherine Hepburn is the mysterious, morphine-addicted mother; and Dean Stockwell is the Eugene avatar, the youngest son cursed with TB. Ralph Richardson, as the aging-lion father, is the film’s rueful heart, though one is reminded of the impossibility of Richardson ever having delivered a dull line-reading in his entire career, or failing to effortlessly invest any moment at all with seething intelligence. Lumet knew it, too — the river of bickering and speeches storms by, but then the film cuts to Richardson in close-up, listening to the others, and the tragedy catches fire. Not quite as ingeniously staged as Lumet’s 12 Angry Men five years earlier, it’s a family melodrama shaped like a slow-closing iron maiden, with its shadows and angles sharpening as the hours progress.
59/365: The Match Factory Girl (Aki Kaurismaki, 1990) (Criterion Channel)
Wintery, austere and brutally funny, a droll working-class horrorshow balanced carefully between dead-serious existential angst and the filmmaker’s trademarked, half-lidded comedy, this Finnish beaut posits Iris (Kati Outinen), a dour, spiritually wasted young woman stuck in a Helsinki factory job and living with her stone-faced, abusive parents, whose life is so empty we don’t hear her speak until nearly half the film’s running time. Her family communicates better with the TV, which is busy broadcasting images of political rebellion from around the world, primarily from Tiannamen Square. With just such encouragement, she impetuously, though expressionlessly, buys a red dress, and her sickly routine is altered forever: she attracts a man, gets pregnant and abandoned, and her blank-faced rebellions get more and more serious, until we ease matter-of-factly into Finnish gothic. Kaurismaki’s film is a lonesome black comedy, as if a a female Buster Keaton were exiled to the outskirts of the civilized world, and Outinen’s hangdog visage transforms one horrible humiliation after another into sight gags you’re dared to laugh at. It is at the same time a superbly controlled, unmannered, chillingly pure film, the work of the kind of demented ascetic who thinks asceticism is funny. The precarious seesawing between comedy and crushing tragedy is a formal joke onto itself, the film’s only outright stunt.
60/365: Strange Cargo (Frank Borzage, 1940) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Strange is right — even the MGM A-team in 1940 was capable of birthing out head-scratching freak-outs, of a kind you can bet gave Louis B. agita. A bizarre survival parable with skylarking Biblical pretensions, shepherded by Joseph A. Mankiewicz and based on a hit novel by Richard Sale, Borzage’s film is set in “the Guianas,” where colonial white men sweat in despair of ever getting out, and where sociopathic convicts (led by Clark Gable, who, coming right off Gone with the Wind, must’ve thought this jaunt was strange indeed) plan an escape into the jungle. Accompanying Albert Dekker’s Cockney thug, Paul Lukas’ Nazi-ish wife-killer, J. Edward Bromberg’s weasel, etc., is Joan Crawford’s manhandled prostitute (how she ends up paying for favors from men is suggested as frankly as the Production Code would allow), and, pivotally, Ian Hunter’s mysterious Christ figure, who seems to have touched down to Earth to save souls. The attack of piety we anticipate the moment we hear Hunter’s refulgent vowels comes, but amid a welter of complicating textures: the odd messiah is often smugly passive-aggressive with his charges, and the cons themselves are seriously evil, ready at a moment’s notice to waste the others. Nature kills off several, and Hunter just shrugs. Conversions, when they come, are compromised by self-interest, animal instincts and, in Dekker’s case, thinly veiled gay love. The overall thrust isn’t terribly heartwarming, but rather rankly cynical, brutally misogynist, and ambivalent at best about divine intervention. Strange indeed for Borzage, who nevertheless imbued the burnished squalor with moments of poetry, and for Crawford, whose embattled femme frays under stress and emerges from stereotype into a three-dimensional woman.
61/365: The Deep End (Scott McGehee & David Siegel, 2001) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play)
As thickly self-conscious and melodramatic as you’d expect from a remake of Max Ophuls’ masterpiece The Reckless Moment (1949) crafted by gay men, this trauma-tale of safe, affluent suburbia gone squirrelly with anxiety, guilt and danger focuses on Brit chameleon Tilda Swinton as a Lake Tahoe soccer matriarch in an SUV who’s confronted with the ultimate Supermom obstacle course: a trolling slime-bucket (Josh Lucas) haunts her closeted teenage son (Jonathan Tucker), and, in a late-night stumble out by the boathouse, summarily dies. Swinton’s troubles only begin: convinced her son killed the bottomfeeder, she decides to abet the imaginary crime by disposing of the body — several times. Of course, the dogs come sniffing, in the form of Goran Visnjic as an extortionist looking to blackmail Swinton for money that the dead man owed. As with the Ophuls, it’s the blackmailer’s strange and unforeseen soft center that is the hinge the story turns on, but the movie’s raw material is Swinton as she scrambles to prevent every aspect of her slim and organized character’s comfortable life — along with her son’s promising future — from going right down the toilet. It’s a discomfiting narrative Hitchcock would’ve loved; like a good horror film, the movie asks us queasy questions about our priorities as we squirm over smug American wealth going up against bad goddamn luck. All of which only hits us where we live because Swinton is such a galvanizing and hypnotizing actress.
62/365: The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Roberto Rossellini, 1966) (Criterion Collection)
Rossellini’s late historical phase hits its chilly peak here — there’s no underselling this anti-epic’s arid wax-museum affect, detailing the history of the Sun King’s ascension, from the death bed of Cardinal Mazarin (when Louis was 22) to the new monarch’s consolidation of control over a fractious kingdom. Rossellini paints every scene like a shadowless Baroque tableaux, keeping the pacing methodical, shooting in actual Versailles spaces where camera movement was sometimes difficult and instead using zooms to capture entire courses of action without resorting to intercutting. The posed iciness that comes of this approach is formidable; it is Rossellini denying cinema’s penchant for easy empathy and illusion, and for the reduction of history to melodrama. Instead, realism: the smells, dire hygiene, dull intervals, waiting, indulgent ritual, petty aristocratic decorum, etc. This acidic approach may arguably have met its Waterloo with the casting of Jean-Marie Patte, a rookie amateur, as Louis — diminutive and robotic, Patte could not remember his lines, and so his dialogue is read from off-screen blackboards, giving the performance a spooky, no-eye-contact detachment that echoes the king’s in his scheming manipulation of other members of court. You could say the upshot is in some senses rather Ed Wood-esque, but it’s also quite Bressonian, a distancing, a winnowing away of the inessentials. The more exhausted we become with the uninflected ritual, and guileless delineation of rampaging guile, the more Rossellini’s point, about Louis and aristocracy but also about our own impatience with unglamorized historical knowledge, is proven.
63/365: Three Monkeys (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2008) (Vimeo, Amazon Prime)
The great Turkish master does a genre film — though this suspenser has little to do with classic noir ideas, and has roots in Greek tragedy, Zola and the Middle Eastern traditions of family honor and retribution. Typically of Ceylan, we come at the narrative gist sideways, by way of innocent witnesses, who stumble upon a body and a car on a night road — we see a man dash from the scene into the shadows, but they don’t. Soon thereafter a politician up for re-election offers to pay his chauffeur (Yavuz Bingol) to take the rap for him and spend a year in a jail, away from his son (Ahmet Rifat Sungar), an aimless, sleep-in student, and Hacer (Hatice Aslon), the boy’s sexy, nagging mother, both living in an Istanbul condo. The year begins to pass, the politico loses his contest, the mother and son decide to bargain for an advance on the money in order to buy a car, and things get horrifically complicated emotionally. The plot rolls downhill with a familiar momentum, but there are potholes and cliffs along the way that are less about genre and more about love and its propensity to devour itself. Virtually every hyperrealist scene is framed several degrees away from orthodoxy, most of the action happens off-frame or at a hypnotizing distance, and characters never reveal what they think is going on but are not sure about. It’s a syntax of anxiety, shot under steely, brooding Mediterranean skies, so we don’t need to be told that when the boiling Eyup comes home, finally, there will be trouble of an irreparable sort, but we still don’t know what form it will take. Ceylan won Best Director at Cannes, his fourth award in five years there.
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
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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