Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 1
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
1/365: Made in U.S.A. (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966) (Criterion Channel, Apple TV, Amazon)
One of the 15 essential rockets Godard launched that made the ’60s his and his alone, this famous film completes the arc of JLG’s evolutionary passage from metafilm messiah to Marxist didact, from the buoyant gamesmanship of Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou and Masculin-Feminin, to the radicalism of 2 or 3 Things I Know about Her, La Chinoise and Week-End. Riffing impishly on noir cliches, composing life as if it were a comic strip, fracturing his ersatz noir story into slivery mirror shards, lallygagging through dramatic confrontations, cutting in splats of audio and advertising and visual punctuation, tossing off movie-movie allusions, indulging in irrational jokes, lacerating Americanization and the crassness of modern culture — it’s all there, all stewed together into a feverish, mysterious brew that’s less a traditional masterpiece than an open-source exploration of the cinema-life interface. It’s also about the romance between Karina and Godard — one of the most impassioned on-screen cataracts of feeling 20th-century cinema produced, and Made in U.S.A. is its requiem. Every inch of the movie is saturated with sorrow, bitterness and ambivalence. On the surface it’s all voguing nonsense, noir fun and bristling politics (the story is actually a contemplation of the disappearance/assassination of radical Medhi Ben Barka), but underneath, we’re watching the art form’s most spellbinding love story crash and burn. Every closeup of Karina (who is lit flatly and often shot too close, as if to reveal her flaws) aches with woe, and almost all of the dialogue has second meanings. The crowning moment is in the first half, when Karina hangs out in a brasserie with her shady noirish pursuers, and as they all evade each others’ eyes, Marianne Faithfull, as herself, sits in a booth and lets loose with a plaintive a cappella version of the Stones’ “As Tears Go By.” It’s the saddest scene in Godard’s oeuvre, and as precious as a real memory.
2/365: The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001) (Vudu, YouTube, Shudder, Amazon)
Fans of The Shape of Water and particularly Pan’s Labyrinth — the three films form a kind of trilogy in which paranormal chaos serves to backlight and in fact confront the venery of living humanity — should seek out this overlooked horror film, made by del Toro as a palate cleanser between the Hollywood assignments of Mimic and Blade II. Having grown up in a post-Night of Tlatelolco Mexico, perpetually on the edge of civil conflict, del Toro has found textual sympathy with the tragic, idealistic arena of the Spanish Civil War, a modern sort of “children’s crusade,” insofar as the conflict seemed from the outside to possess a clear-cut, right-vs.-might purity. Backbone is one of the most childhood-fraught horror films of modern times outside of J-horror, set entirely in an isolated Castilian orphanage where an unexploded air raid shell protruding from the courtyard is rumored by the children to be haunted, where the left-wing adults in residence are resigned to doom as the Fascists encroach, and where a child’s ghost cannot stop warning the innocents of further cataclysms to come. At the center, a young orphan (Fernando Tielve) struggles with a dozen kinds of half-knowledge (overheard mumblings, superstitions, bullying threats, secret caches, sighing spirits, etc.), in a landscape where armed slaughter lurks over the hills, always on the verge of descending. As in Pan’s Labyrinth, it’s a pungent trope — from a child’s subjective perspective, a bloody civil conflict appears as it is in its essence, a heavens-fall contest between beloved victims and neighborhood monsters, with the children underfoot bearing the greatest cost (suggesting the Nigerian proverb that says when elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers).
3/365: The Whole Shootin’ Match (Eagle Pennell, 1978) (SundanceNow, MUBI, Amazon)
Long-forgotten and then rediscovered, Pennell’s super-cheap Texas indie is by now something of an subculture legend — its pro-am fickleness and grit inspired Robert Redford to start the Sundance Film Festival, while Pennell’s nascent career as a newly anointed avatar of “regional cinema” in the Star Wars era crashed and petered out thanks to his apparently catastrophic alcoholism. A 16mm double-shot of awkward loser whimsy, Pennell’s movie follows two hick dummies (Sonny Davis and Lou Perryman) from one get-rich scheme after another (a turbo-accented vacuum invention is one such tangent, after talk of a failed flying squirrel farm), eking out life on the edge of commerce and success characterized as barren neighborhoods, claustrophobic kitchens and worn pickup interiors, as bracing a visit to the middle country as the late-70s had to offer. The fellas are mundane cartoons, a redneck version of Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton, but the unprofessional actors’ awkward conviction and Pennell’s relaxed pacing makes them charming and genuine. The rather slight movie — which has a mighty fan base — might be most evocative of another lost paradigm: indie filmmaking as we knew it in during the Carter and Reagan administrations, proudly clumsy, poverty-stricken, grainy, quirky, focused on layabouts, and free from Industry ambition.
4/365: The Story of a Cheat (Sacha Guitry, 1936) (Criterion Channel)
Guitry, long a household name in France, was a vital contemporary of Pagnol and Renoir in the ’30s and beyond, as well as a furious gadabout and story geyser who tirelessly produced plays, screenplays, movies, scandals and marriages for decades (in the 1968 biography Sacha Guitry: The Last Boulevardier, author James Harding acknowledges that in his primary research “the lips of Sacha’s surviving widows were, understandably, sealed.”), beginning as a theater sensation and segueing into cinema in fits and starts before crafting this odd debut. It’s as stylized and idiosyncratic as any movie of the ’30s, shot MOS and told in flashback almost entirely by voiceover, and quite possibly the decade’s fastest film — Guitry careens through his hero’s picaresque travails (punished for rectitude and rewarded for thievery, through romance, war and heists) as though it were a contemporary action film. Wry and fable-like, the film established a tone (amused, aloof, sharp-tongued and hedonistic) Guitry would cleave to for many years, but what’s more remarkable is the measure of egomaniacal reflexivity — at the outset, Guitry signs his name as the master of ceremonies, and in lieu of a credit roll films his crew and cast acting out for the camera, simultaneously telling us “they know they’re being filmed.” (From whence came Welles’s Ambersons coda.) Insouciantly self-involved, Guitry (who resembled a Sephardic Barrymore with Criswell hair) counts on our own vanity for empathic cooperation, a la Wilde, and it still works like gangbusters.
5/365: The Living End (Gregg Araki, 1992) (Criterion Channel, YouTube, SundanceNow, Amazon)
A ’90s road movie apothoesis, this raw New Queeer Cinema landmark reinvents the genre for its day and age — no one had as much reason to screw the system and hit the road than its HIV-positive gay pair of hard-luck misfits. Soon after learning his test results and beginning a journal-on-tape (“Death is weird,” he concludes), Jon (Craig Gilmore), a slim film writer bearing no small resemblance to a young Peter Fonda, meets up with Luke (Mike Dytri),a laconic muscle-bound free-floater whose recent experiences on the fringe have included escaping a pair of homicidal lesbians and in turn using their gun to kill three would-be gay-bashers. It’s not long after the first of several passionate sex scenes that Luke shows up in the middle of the night and confesses to killing a cop, a la Breathless (Jon’s room is decorated with Godard posters), and together they take it on the lam with only the vaguest idea of destination. Araki, a then-31 guerilla-method independent stationed in L.A., makes up for what his film lacks in technical proficiency and polish with scads of attitude — the film is is arch, postured, self-indulgent and exhibitionistic, making up for what it lacks in sophistication (the script is littered with bad puns, labored dick jokes, student film shortcuts, quaint post-punk death-&-sex proclamations) with its graceful cooptation of genre. Perhaps using AIDS as the pretense for a romantic outlaw fable is a matter of taste; Araki admittedly has none, proudly.
6/365: The Overcoat (Alberto Lattuada, 1952) (Amazon)
The rare instance of an Italian adaptation of classic Russian lit, this nearly forgotten neo-realism-era comedy from vet director Lattuada transplant’s Gogol’s absurdist tale of bureaucratic doom to the familiarly decaying streets and cavernous municipal offices of Rome, where Carmine (Renato Rascel), a bumbling clerk and stenographer, confronts his low station under the boot-heels of power. His solution is to replace his tattered coat with a new model, thereby going deep into debt and allowing himself to pridefully meddle with the layers of hierarchy until, fatefully, his coat is stolen right off his back, and his destiny is sealed. Gogol’s story is here inflated with all manner of high and low farce (the work of seven contributing screenwriters, including movement-staple Cesare Zavattini), extrapolating either on Carmine’s hapless, whimpering idiocy (coopting umbrellas and other forms of mobile shelter during a rain storm, hunting for cash he forgot he’d hidden) or on the density of self-involved silliness and corrupt vacuity within state government, which here takes on a distinctly Italian flavor. Gogol’s social satire is modernized sharply, to the point that nearly everything official uttered by Carmine’s superiors is a Bizarro World contradiction or an outright lie. Rascel, who comes off like a diminutive cross between a young DeNiro and George Tobias, may be a bit too much of a schtick comedian to make the character live in three dimensions, but the film is gorgeously shot in eye-tearing black-&-white by Maro Montuori, and ends up being one of postwar Italy’s strangest projects, proudly “anti-neo-realist.”
7/365: (500) Days of Summer (Marc Webb, 2009) (Hulu, Vudu, Amazon, Disney+)
Tirelessly inventive, Webb’s hit romance is filled with love like a zeppelin — love for its characters and for taletelling and for what we dream of love stories to be and what they really are. Plus, a love for The Smiths, The Graduate, bouncy small talk, karaoke, the parts of Los Angeles you never see in films (thank God), the 60s, being young and heartbroken, and the way light shines through Zooey Deschanel’s baby-blue irises. A carefully crafted fugue between a romance’s early dizziness and its later terminal agonies, bouncing back and forth from early in the 500 days to late, and often revisiting the same moments over and over, all of it fueled by old-fashioned movie star charm; Deschanel and Joseph Gordon Leavitt have lovely, self-conscious, secret-keeping, fast-talking characters to play and they play them like a thoroughbreds. But you step back a bit, and the movie has a larger dialogue to have with us and the culture we’re in — specifically, about the mileage between now and the 60s, and how for Summer and Tom’s generation an idealization of the supercool free-love past is a way to manage the empty-hearted present. Which is cinephilia, isn’t it? The catnip alt-rock soundtrack is contemporary, until the movie’s final suite, under Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bookends,” when the relationship is dying on-screen but no one says anything about it. The film is saturated with movie-love, in an expressly Godardian way — why can’t I go through a week without dropping the G bomb? — comically referencing Breathless as well as Anna Karina’s coif. But the key to the hidden levels is The Graduate, which is used wittily at first as a flashback riff, until the end, when Tom and Summer go to a revival of the movie, and at the climax Summer is left weeping for the wrecked promise of perfect love she always knew was a lie, and Tom still holds on blindly to the dream.
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, 50, 51, 52
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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