Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 20
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
134/365: Suture (David Siegel and Scott McGehee, 1993) (Criterion Channel, Tubi, Amazon)
Possibly the most self-conscious and postmod-theory-drenched neo-noir ever made, Siegel and McGehee’s debut feature came at the crest of the Soderbergh-Van Sant-Linklater-Tarantino Sundance “dependie” wave, and was perhaps a bit too hyper-ironic and over-aestheticized to make much of a splash. The story is not unfamiliar: two half-brothers meet after their wealthy father has died and discover they’re identical; one stages his own death using the other (after switching IDs, etc.). The victim survives the car bomb but is amnesiac, and is therein reeducated as the first brother, into a life he’d never known. The daring trump card from the gitgo is the casting: one brother (Dennis Haysbert) is black, the other (Michael Harris) is white, and nobody in the film’s universe sees the difference. (The plastic surgery Haysbert’s patsy receives is, we’re told, modeled on Harris’ photos, but there is no change when the bandages come off.) This imbues every scene with a fiercely odd subtextual charge that can be read any number of ways — is the film about racism, or, more perhaps aptly, does it use race as a signifier for identity crises and class inequalities in general? You could argue just as easily that, since most of the plot resists social engagement and rather hews exclusively to the patient’s slow, medically-assisted attempts to recover an identity that isn’t his, it doesn’t mean much at all. Or, is it about black Americans striving to “be white,” even though in Siegel and McGehee’s diegesis, there’s no difference between one or the other? Shot in pearly, studied widescreen black-&-white, Suture may be in retrospect the definitive Obamaland movie — an idealized vision of a race-blind world nevertheless fraught with spite, violence and lostness.
135/365: Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, 2006) (Mubi, Apple TV, Kanopy, Amazon)
This is the film that more or less left Hong’s bitter gender-combat tone behind, and turned him into a globally beloved maker of gentle comedies — it has a bouncy rom-com score, and even indulges in medium close-ups and reckless zooms. The two-guy-one-girl set-up remains, and it’s Hong at his simplest and most trusting; suddenly, simply letting the characters control the tale, a la Rohmer, is sufficient for him. The trio — a neurotic, womanizing director, his schoolmate-cum-set designer, and the married set designer’s “girlfriend” — head out to an off-season seaside resort to finish a screenplay. They can’t get rooms, but then they do; the men volley for the woman’s affections, but she’s sarcastic and self-assured, and gives neither of them much leeway. The relationships begin to collapse, under sexual pressure, betrayal and drunkenness. Eventually the three go separate ways, and we stay with the director, who returns to the resort town and ropes in another woman, under the pretense that she resembles the other (she doesn’t), and haphazardly begins to relive the first dalliance all over again. And then the first woman returns… The actors are healthily free range — as the director, Kim Seung-woo is such an irritating, moist-eyed mess he is at times difficult to watch, and it’s hard not to wonder if, given Hong’s patterns and recurring concerns, if there’s isn’t a little autobiographical chili in the kimchi. But it remains a warm movie — the women emerge unscarred, and there even lingers a sense of hope for the men. The movie is not named after a 1947 Jean Renoir romance-noir, involving two men and two women and a seaside, for nothing.
136/365: Iguana (Monte Hellman, 1988) (Amazon)
Hellman’s scattershot career was not emboldened by this oddity, appearing ten years after his previously ill-distributed movie and barely released, vanishing thereafter into the fog of cult auteurist rumor. It’s a freaky movie, with vestigial traces of Hellman’s old existentialist vibe but a period-parable template derived from a novel by prolific post-colonial novelist Alberto Vasquez-Figueroa, itself loosely based on the case of nutty Galapagos colonizer Patrick Watkins. It’s the 1800s, and Everett McGill plays a sailor-harpoonist cursed with unexplained lizard-skin deformation; constantly persecuted and tortured by his shipmates, he eventually jumps ship and lands on a desert island, which he immediately claims as his as a bulwark against the rest of mankind and against God. When stragglers and holidayers wash up (including sailor Michael Madsen and sultry rogue baroness Maru Valdivielso), they are either butchered or enslaved by the new monarch, who exacts his revenge on the world by imitating oppressive colonial power. Shot largely on the Canary Islands, homeland of Vasquez-Figueroa, Hellman’s film can be slow and prosaic, but its essential political force has an elemental quality familiar from Hellman’s earlier westerns, and the methodical spectacle of the oppressed irrationally acting out the crimes of the oppressor has a torque that’s as Freudian as it is Marxist. Iguana was not, it turns out, a film Hellman even wanted to make, and he has characterized the production experience as “terrible.” If the director’s name was unknown, the movie could seem a freaky art-myth that might inspire hope for his or her next opus; from Hellman, it’s a head-scratching tangent in a beloved but sketchy trajectory.
137/365: The Damned (Rene Clement, 1947) (Amazon, Kanopy)
A fascinating postwar enthrallment from the fitful first years of Clement’s serious era as an auteur, this forgotten thriller is set in 1945 at war’s close, and almost entirely on a German U-boat escaping from Oslo loaded with fleeing Nazis. The “Noah’s Ark” of supremacist fugitives include an implicitly gay couple of a SS hardass and a young disaffected assassin, a Nazi general, the hot German dame he’s dallying with, her Fascist cuckold of an Italian husband, a Swedish quisling, etc., and for a while it appears to be the only submarine film ever made in which we’d hope all of the pressure-cooker inhabitants would simply sink to the ocean’s bottom. But very soon a doctor is required, and during a stop in wartorn Royan before launching to South America a good-hearted French doctor (Henri Vidal) is kidnapped, and thereafter his precarious usefulness to the Germans becomes a matter of subterfuge and internecine psychodrama, all under the Atlantic. That is, until they land in the Southern hemisphere and learn that Hitler is dead: connections dangle, backstabbings multiply, and everyone starts worrying about war-crimes testimony. Shot as if etched in mercury by legendary craftsman Henri Alekan (right after Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete), Clement’s movie is a high-concept actioneer before there was such a thing, but steely with noir fatalism and still raw with the uneasiness of villainizing Axis partisans in light of so much collaborationism, mere opportunism and ambivalence. Clement’s commitment to postwar realism places most of the exterior-sub scenes on a real U-boat out at sea, but many other set-pieces, including a Reedian hunt through a Brazilian warehouse stacked high with coffee bean sacks, are shadowy and evocative in a manner that suits the existential set-up.
138/365: Down to the Bone (Debra Granik, 2004) (Vudu, Amazon)
Vera Farmiga’s unusual, red-haired, aquiline visage, with its startling moon-blue cat eyes and a toothy smile that breaks like glass under pressure, set this raw indie on fire; she plays an upstate-New York supermarket cashier with a working-class husband, two kids, a small suburban house, and a jones for dope she thinks she can control. Farmiga’s Irene does, in fact, keep her coke habit under wraps most of the time — hunting for inebriation opportunities with her looming eyes even as she dresses her boys for trick-or-treat and cooks dinner. As the season gets colder, Irene gets more desperate — and then, surprisingly, and because she seems a little too smart to get lost in complete irresponsibility, checks into rehab (much to the chagrin of her co-snorting hubby). Doper melodramas can be repetitious and dull, but Granik’s movie says so close to Farmiga you can hear her breath accelerate when cocaine is near. Irene’s plight is in any case far from a smooth ascent out of or descent toward junkiehood — in the ’70s style, the film respects the struggle between clean sanity and polluted self-satisfaction, and comes as close as any film in its strange subgenre to suspending judgment. (If you had Irene’s dire low-rent life, you’d want to get high, too.) Farmiga is a show onto herself, an object lesson in how an actor sometimes only need to scan a room with her eyes to makes us hold our breath.
139/365: Hands Over the City (Francesco Rosi, 1963) (Criterion Channel)
A post-Neo-Realist gimlet-eyed essay on inequity, Rosi’s masterful film is a poison-pen rendition of a polluted urban bureaucracy. It’s a tough breed of movie to make, and nobody has done it as well as Rosi — his Salvatore Giuliano, released the year before, chronicles the career of the titular Sicilian insurrectionist-cum-bandit without ever making him a character in the film; instead, the sociopolitical hellfire erupting around him, from both sides of the law, is documented and dissected. This Neapolitan saga begins with a rampaging developer (Rod Steiger) hawking the city’s northern ghettos for profitable gentrification to Parliament members — and then, on the eve of an election, a building in the project collapses, killing two and crippling a child. (Rosi shoots this cataclysm in a breathless montage that leaves you wondering how the cameramen survived.) From there, a tapestry of molten social conflict is crafted, as Leftist politicians insist on an investigation and attempt to head off the backroom collusion between Steiger’s all-business moneymen and the government’s “center” faction. There’s nothing dry or pedantic at work here — it’s feverish, vital drama with essential political morality is at stake. Steiger’s presence may’ve sold the film in 1963, but he’s merely a single figure in an ensemble that sometimes seems to include all of Naples. The upshot is an expansive and tumultuous community portrait, in which real people’s lives and welfares are decided by flabby, middle-aged men in expensive suits. The film is fiction, but, Rosi tells us in an ending title, “The Context Is Real.” And universal, and timeless, he could’ve added.
140/365: I Was Born, But… (Yasujiro Ozu, 1932) (Criterion Channel, Mubi, Kanopy, Archive.org, Amazon)
This silent classic is from the first phase of Ozu’s unassailable career, back when Japan was just acquiring talkie technology (the first sound film came in 1931, but Ozu, a lifelong heel-digger, waited a few more years), and when he, in his late 20s, was just finding the calm and observant syntax that made him happy for the next three decades. (In synopsis, all Ozu films sound mundane, and the early comedies even more so — but visually there’s something mysterious going on here, as he exercises his personality on the camera, the cuts, the actors and the length of shots, and comes away with experiences that feel just as large as our real lives, and just as poignant.) This film — saying it’s the masterwork feature that Hal Roach never made out of the Our Gang shorts is saying a lot — lands on the tatami mats of a struggling salaryman family, this time blessed with two young brothers, who battle their new neighborhood’s complex and contentious schoolboy society as they reflectively confront their father’s low position on the company totempole. It’s a film about power as it’s prized and exchanged and used on every social level, but it’s also outrageously, hypnotically funny, with the most precise and eloquent camera placement outside of Keaton, and the best cast of implacable child actors ever assembled for a comedy. Remarkably, the visual palate Ozu used until his final film is here (low-angle mid-shots, skies cut by eaves and telephone wire, etc.), as well as his battery of endlessly affecting gestures (i.e., the reaction shot that begins with an inexpressive pause, as if still registering the pleasure or hurt that came before). But here, the kids rule — no crisis is so intense that the action can’t pause for a crotch scratch or the urge to pick up a rock off the road.
Year Four Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19
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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