Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 12
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
78/365: Putty Hill (Matt Porterfield, 2010) (Fandor, Kanopy, SundanceNow, Amazon)
An ultra-indie, Porterfield’s searching, brooding exploration of a threadbare working-class Baltimore suburb takes the most salient aspects of the mumblecore trend — ultra-realistic lighting, non-directive camerawork, grungy Gen-Y spaces (floored mattresses, not beds), low-rent ambience, downbeat action and acting so naturalistic that little seems to happen — and invests it with crafty power. The most arresting departure from orthodoxy, amid this immersion in reality, is to have the inarticulate young characters suddenly and at unpredictable moments begin fielding questions from behind the camera, as if they’re in a documentary, giving the whole film the air of anthropology as well as meta-minimalism, like a Yankee counterpart to Kiarostami, Hou, Tsai and Costa. The central event is the recent O.D. death (or suicide) of a local twentysomething lad, which draws the scrubby community into a tight nexus of bruised psyches and lost lives. The heroine only gradually emerges from the crowd of wandering teens and dope-inhaling lowlifes — Jenny (Sky Ferreira), the dead boy’s cousin who comes back to town for the funeral and has to suffer living with her ex-con/tattoo-artist Dad (Charles Sauers), whose cheap digs are full of seamy traffic and constant needle-work loud enough to warrant subtitles. We glimpse the relationships only in cross-section slices, when they’re not teased out by Porterfield’s off-screen interrogator; our omnipresence is grasps at meaning while the characters struggle to reveal as little as possible. Porterfield’s camera is carefully placed, and off-screen space is enormous. The cast, is, predictably, all non-pro, and all assembled for a completely different film when financial backing vanished, leaving Porterfield to quickly muster a loose situational structure for the native Baltimoreans and then filming them improvise. As an example of how to make a true U.S. indie with a pure heart, rigorous intent and a mature eye, it might turn out to be something like a landmark.
79/365: Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (Ulu Grosbard, 1971) (YouTube)
A forgotten entry both in the annals of the American New Wave and in Dustin Hoffman’s rise to stardom, this loose-jointed escapade — from a Herb Gardner screenplay — was New Hollywood’s effort at an all-American 8 ½, exploring the neurotic daydreams and frazzled psyche of a Bob Dylanesque singer-songwriter megastar as he wrestles with his own loneliness, insomnia, ruined relationships, and a self-doubt so intense he’s schizophrenically waging a character-assassination campaign against himself. With a shaggy Dylan coif and mumbly affect, Hoffman flits through the film in a relentless state of pleading confusion, bouncing off his possibly-imagined German shrink (Jack Warden), his beleaguered accountant (Dom DeLuise), a theater-director compatriot who’s also a suave lady-killer (Gabriel Dell), and memories of an innocent old girlfriend (Regina Baff) and his unhappy ex-wife (Rose Gregorio). Things crystallize, after a fashion, once Barbara Harris shows up as a would-be actress at an audition, filling out a definitive post-’60s flibbertigibbet with showstopping neurotic fireworks that landed her a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. The opening sequence may be one of the cinema’s deftest evocations of creative compulsion, as Hoffman’s Georgie tapes a suicide note to his lofty Manhattan balcony, but reconsiders his jump in order to rewrite it and get the language right. Clearly beloved by the Coen brothers — not only in respect to Inside Llewyn Davis but also to sequences lifted wholesale for The Big Lebowski — Grosbard’s tender little movie thrives via a profusion of ethnic-New York character acting, dallying as even American indies can no longer on a character’s babbling-brook speech patterns or idiosyncratic manner of conversation. Zested up briefly by a live concert Hoffman joins in character by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show (featuring Shel Silverstein on lead vocals), the film is a little slapdash, which if you’re pining for the days of experimental, New Wavey on-the-fly moviemaking is far from an insult.
80/365: Le Cercle Rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970) (Criterion Channel, Vudu, Apple TV, Amazon)
However supercool and desperate and retroactively magnificent it is, American film noir rarely had — film for film — much deliberate philosophical torque; they were programmers, mostly, and came by their collective resonance after the fact, first in the hearts of French cineastes, and then for everyone, and it was Melville who reentered the genre and gave it a philosophical heart. This, his penultimate film, is something of a summation, slicing through its overcast, uncaring, starkly capitalist world by way of Alain Delon’s weary shark-like gaze. He’s a hood released from prison on the condition of a corrupt guard’s idea for a heist; simultaneously, Gian Maria Volonte (looking every bit of Joaquim Phoenix a few years from now) is an escaped crook chased by a massive manhunt, led by grimly toast-dry detective Andre Bourvil (ending a long career as a comic playing against type). Diners, rainy streetcorners, winter fields — the fraught paths meander and cross, but neither the film nor the characters are in a hurry; fatalism is, after all, the long story. Eventually, Yves Montand, as a DT-ing alkie sharpshooter living in a Lynch-like antechamber, is recruited, and the silent jewel thievery begins, but the spirit of the film hardly gives us hope that they will succeed — even when they do, because the trouble comes around again, as it must. In Melville’s trenchcoated nexus — a suite of eight films, over 17 years — the social crisis of noir becomes a steely fable of Godlessness.
81/365: Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006) (Kanopy, Amazon)
A post-Dogme entity, borne out of an idea by Dogmatists Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen (three films by firsttime filmmakers, using the same set of preordained characters), this Scottish film takes on modern surveillance culture, in a neo-Hitchcockian way. We’re introduced to Jackie (Kate Dickie), a bony, haunted middle-aged woman working as a monitor to Glasgow’s plethora of CCTV surveillance cameras. Her life is otherwise an empty shell; her tether to humankind is in being an official voyeur, taking pleasure in children, sympathizing with the owner of an ailing dog, and getting off surreptitiously observing back alley sex. Things shift into high gear, plotwise, when Jackie spots a familiar face — the post-coital mug of a man she’d hoped never to see again. So she keeps watching, and begins entering the frame herself, as it were, revisiting places where she’d seen him and eventually crossing over into his social sphere. Resonant and atmosphere-saturated, Arnold’s film withholds its heroine’s motivations and thoughts for a very long time, gratifyingly — not knowing reflects eloquently back on how much she doesn’t know about the lives she watches on her bank of video monitors. Eventually, the subterranean story surfaces, and forgives us if we prefer the hanging mysteries to the familiar backstory — alas, the structure of narrative demands that questions be answered, at least in most films. (Hence the force of postmodernist filmmaking, like Bergman’s and Haneke’s.) The journey of watching and knowing/not knowing is the gas in the tank here, and for it Arnold won a Jury Prize at Cannes.
82/365: The Cheat (George Abbott, 1931) (YouTube)
This bizarre little Paramount early-talkie comes at us not as a slice of auteurist steak (George Abbott’s eight-decade-long career is consumed mostly by writing mid-century stage hits like The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees), nor a rare glimpse of star Tallulah Bankhead in her prime (the spitting image of a mature Jodie Foster, she is adept but hardly compelling). No, of course the film arrives amid the ardent excavations of pre-Code-ness — a beloved genre unto itself by now, pre-Code movies are a freshly retro-minted brand, movies that speak to sin and sex and dope and bigotry like wild teenagers. As a close remake of the 1915 Cecil B. deMille melodrama, it’s mired in vice, as Bankhead’s spoiled gambling addict, deep in debt and engaged to a penniless financier, strikes a paid-sex bargain with a debauched Orientalist (a very creepy Irving Pichel, replacing the real Asian Sessue Hayakawa played in deMille’s version), who collects figurines of his sexual conquests and likes to literally brand his possessions. The plot manages by a whisker to avoid indulging in sexual compromise, but the air is thick with humiliation and shame, emotional registers that don’t necessarily suit Bankhead very smoothly. Once you know her hedonistic, scandalizing bisexual history, which included liaisons with scores of other stars and a gonorrhea bout (which she said Gary Cooper delivered) that necessitated a hysterectomy that nearly killed her, you find yourself reading her efforts at expressing contrition as half-hearted, if not disingenuous. In any case, she made only a few more movies before leaving Hollywood for Broadway, maybe because she saw the Code coming. She stayed away for 12 years, until Alfred Hitchcock recruited her for Lifeboat.
83/365: Cloud 9 (Andreas Dresen, 2008) (Vudu, Apple TV, Kanopy, Amazon)
A German romance and infidelity drama that’s notorious for the fact that its protagonists are all senior citizens, and they have sex, this film pays close attention to its ultra-realistic characters, who aren’t fraught with neuroses or motivations or ego, and so they’re allowed, in a perfectly natural way, to bask in simple acts of physical kindness and sensual pleasures that aren’t orgasmic, just intimate. Inge (Ursula Werner) is late-60s housewife whose older husband Karl (Horst Westphal) requires a certain amount of physical care at home; otherwise, her days are taken up in the quiet, minute-to-minute ways senior citizens have, with earning cash as a seamstress and practicing with her senior-center choral group. At the film’s outset, however, she delivers altered pants to aging widower Werner (Karl Rehberg) and impulsively screws him, on the spot. From there, Inge resists and then succumbs to additional liaisons, with the director potently contrasting the senior-center horsecrap and her genuinely rapturous encounters with Werner, backlighting the dead-end scenarios we write for our elder population as opposed to the fleshy, more hedonistic possibilities they could pursue. Then Inge spills the beans to her husband, out of guilt, and a thunderstorm forms over what was a placid marital field for over 30 years. Dresen brings a good deal of finesse: one sharp decision was the casting of Werner, who is an accomplished German actress in a career that stretches to the ’60s, but who is also not gorgeous. It would’ve been quite the Hollywood movie to cast a hot septuagenarian in the role — Jessica Lange, say — but instead Dresen focused on a woman we see the likes of everyday, whom we never dream of having a sexual appetite or the capacity to uproot the middle-class world that’s anchored her whole life. There are costs incurred, but the film’s natural-lighting realism is never compromised for fireworks. And that last shot — just an expression, a close-up of Rehberg, but it’s a hammerblow.
84/365: Apartment Zero (Martin Donovan, 1988) (YouTube)
Donovan’s film made one of biggest indie splashes of the late ’80s, co-opting primal Hitchcockian ingredients and going for broke. Set, evocatively, in Buenos Aires, the creepy-yet-comic movie tracks the unsettled but budding friendship-cum-codependency between two immigrant roommates — a boisterous, hedonistic, semi-educated American (Hart Bochner) and a socially inept, nervous British movie geek (Colin Firth). A serial killer is meanwhile terrorizing the city, and suspicions fly just as social virtues are exchanged and each man begins to leech off the other. Naturally, an imbalance is reached, personalities imperfectly swap (kinda), and blood spills. The actors have a revving ball, while their characters introduces a pre-Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon moviehead parlor game: simply, one person names three actors from a film, the other must name the film. Firth’s neurotic dweeb beats out Bochner’s rangy hotshot every time, but the Apartment Zero game quickly established an extra-cinematic life all its own, and ends up indexing scores of remembered mystery-thriller tropes from older movies, to ironically color the plot. Very satisfying.
Year Four Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
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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