Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 25
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
169/365: The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) (Tubi, Vudu, Apple TV, Amazon, YouTube)
Shyamalan’s big box-office blockbuster, this famous and overseen film has its nervous thumb on something, a sharp regard for miserable preadolescent disconnectedness, and for how everyday life can ripple with fear. With few F/X to speak of (the characters’ icy breath is CGI’d, which must be cheaper than refrigerating the set à la The Exorcist), Shyamalan shows restraint and some screenwriting wisdom detailing the life of a Philadelphia nine-year-old (Haley Joel Osment) who appears to be emotionally disturbed, but is in fact terrorized by the presence of dead spirits day and night. We see only a few genuinely chilling ghosts; mostly, the film feels huddled in apprehension. Bruce Willis, as the boy’s psychologist, is simply the impassive venture capital that got Shyamalan’s movie made; its real resource is Osment (an Oscar nomination).
His pitifully scrunched brow, choked silences, and curdled voice, suggesting tortures so dreadful parents will tie themselves in knots, are the movie’s best special effect. Shyamalan achieves his coldest moments when looking at something, mostly Osment, dead on, if otherwise the film often gets lost in overlit opulence and the soundtrack going boo, in the manner of high-profile thrillers. But complain all you want about Willis’s posturing and the rabbit-in-the-hat ending (predicated as it is on a vast plothole), the film is still a rarity, a studio horror movie focused on a child’s traumatic stress.
170/365: The Treasure (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2015) (Apple TV, Amazon)
A dry-rubbed lark from the often harrowing ultra-realist territories of the Romanian New Wave, this farce is about almost nothing — a shaggy-dog daydream as flyaway as its protagonists’ thoughts of instant wealth. Porumboiu reportedly began it as a documentary, wherein the filmmaker would follow countryman and cineaste Adrian Purcarescu on his journey to find a legendary family treasure supposedly buried by his great-grandfather on the grounds of a country estate on the eve of the Communist takeover in 1947. Somehow, it became fiction, with Purcarescu playing a modified version of himself, and Toma Cuzin enlisted as Costi, the hapless protagonist and family man whose help and funds Purcarescu enlists for his scheme. It’s a film of matter-of-fact simplicity, despite its meta-ness; in what may be the quietest heist movie ever made, the logistics are everything, beginning with Costi’s on-the-job lies to his boss (which entangle effortlessly), and proceeding to the hiring of a medium-tech metal detector, the operator of which is obligated by law to report any pre-WWII findings to the state. (The owners might net 30% of its worth in the end.) What to do, except hire the firm’s lackey off the books instead, after he’s promised to turn his back and report nothing?
The visuals are nearly all medium-distant, and the comedy is all textural, in the fallow beats and ellipses between the three men (the cucumber-cool detector operator, Corneliu Cozmei, plays himself), as the arduous process of scanning the overgrown property, with two different devices of varying reliability, ensues. Unseen beneath the grassy soil lurk the tell-tale vestiges of the 20th century, from the perhaps-apocryphal pre-war booty to the metals left behind as the Communists turned the estate into a series of schools, bars and strip clubs. Still today, the remnants of the Ceausescu era are everywhere; to find hope or salvation in the pre-Communist past, all you can do is dig.
171/365: The Maids of Wilko (Andrzej Wajda, 1979) (EasternEuropeanMovies.com)
Tallying up the life work of Polish demiurge Wajda can be like taking on history itself — a national history made up of movies. Beginning with his first short made when he was 25, he left behind a career that ran for a ridiculous 65 years, dominating his country’s cinematic personality. He never made a movie for the hell of it — every film on his huge shelf burns with necessity. Still, he is hardly the model for auteurist neatness, never hewing closely to a particular theme or tonal sensibility; we may be able to share notions of what’s Polanskian or Godardian or Antonioniesque, but Wajda’s name never became a metonym. Sure, he unavoidably took on the psychosocial whiplash of living under Communism, but what kind of filmmaker was he?
You could say Wajda had wide-ranging interests and catholic tastes, but he also held onto a staunch belief in ambivalence: his political films were always more ethically muddy than didactic, and his characters were more zesty existentialist strugglers than victims of oppression. This mid-career drama, largely overlooked, is a tender, strange and deeply mournful Woolfian ode, set in the 1920s, with Daniel Olbrychski’s veteran of the Polish-Soviet War returning to his aunt’s village, and flirting with a family of six sisters he’d dallied with 15 years earlier. Now, one is dead, several are unhappily married, and all are haunted by days gone by and the empty disappointments of the years ahead, a nest of wounds and anxiety the vaguely discontented hero cannot hope to heal. Less psychological than existential, the movie aches with the sorrow of lost opportunities, and the bruising march of time.
172/365: Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002) (Vudu, Apple TV, Amazon, YouTube)
The political and physical facts at the heart of Phillip Noyce’s film are brutal: the 200-year-long cultural smackdown between European settlers and the eventually decimated Aboriginal society, boiled down to systematic enslavement. Kidnapping Aboriginal children from their families “for their own good” and training them as servants became, in the case of “half-caste” children, official state policy. This program persisted, astonishingly, into the 1970s, but Noyce’s film is set in 1932, when three girls, aged 14, 10 and eight, were snatched from their family and sent to a slave camp 1200 miles away. Indignantly, they escaped, walking for months back north along the titular, continent-dividing fence, one step ahead of the law. Based on a memoir by a grown daughter of the eldest girl and rarely digressing from the journey itself, the movie is a dusty, calloused, primal Children’s Crusade, as forceful and single-minded as a bullet-train.
As the three willful girls, Everlyn Sampi, Tianna Sansbury and Laura Monaghan are indelibly haunted, vigilant and bitter, and the Australian outlands, photographed by Christopher Doyle, become a natural anvil for human suffering, and the unforgettable image of ragged children adrift in the desert is often compressed into an apocalyptic frieze traversed by Giacometti refugees. The scenes featuring earnest, miscegenationist bureaucrat Kenneth Branagh fretting over the recovery operation feel a bit canned, but Noyce’s priorities are miraculously in place: he knows that the tale naturally exudes near-mythic outrage, and all he need do is focus on the little fugitives’ battered feet and empty eyes.
173/365: Workingman’s Death (Michael Glawogger, 2005) (Apple TV, Amazon, DocumentaryArea.tv)
A challenging, narrative-free doc that dives to the roots of all politics, Glawogger’s rather majestic film takes a symphonic structure to document some of the ugliest and most dangerous shit work on the globe. Implicit in the journey is a stomach-churning critique of the New Globalism, even if this unmentioned position is better illustrated by the Indonesian sulphur haulers, working on the belly of an active volcano vividly jaundiced with chemicals, than the Ukrainian closed-coal-mine squatters, whose scrounging subsistence might not have been that different a century ago. The appallingly surreal sequence set in an open-air Nigerian slaughterhouse — imagine your favorite Francis Bacon nightmare times a thousand, with lakes of blood — might also have been little changed over the millennia.
Be that as it may. The final major sequence (before twin codas set in a Chinese steel mill and a bizarre German theme park retrofitted from a massive metalworks) watches laborers in Pakistan gamble with their underpaid lives by cutting up gargantuan decommissioned freighters for scrap on the banks of the Arabian Sea. Glawogger’s film may be thematically loose-jointed, but Wolfgang Thaler’s cinematography is the glue; the signature move — a flowing Steadicam track before or following a subject — blooms into variations on a visceral theme, especially as it rhymes the Nigerian butchers stalking through acres of red mud dragging bull heads with the Indonesians carrying rocks down smoking, tourist-littered mountain paths. John Zorn’s pensive electro-score ramps up the disquiet.
174/365: I Knew Her Well (Antonio Pietrangeli, 1965) (Criterion Channel, YouTube, Vudu, Apple TV, Amazon)
This neglected New Wavey autopsy on modern showbiz culture would be a satire if it were funny — instead, and despite a bouncy esprit radiating off star Stefania Sandrelli, the movie’s narrative goes down like gelato and then slowly clots in your throat. It begins suggestively enough: a long tracking survey of a litter-strewn beach, accompanied by a jaunty ’60s bop, eventually landing on topless bimbo Adriana (Sandrelli) oiled and stretched out in the sand. Suddenly late for work, she dashes down the empty street holding her bikini on (until she enlists an idling shopkeeper to hook her up), and arrives at her hairdresser’s shop, only to flop exhausted on the backroom sofa. Soon enough, at day’s end, the middle-aged owner arrives and she lies down for him as she obviously had a hundred times already. There’s hardly a mature thought running through this feckless gamine’s skull, and Pietrangeli’s film evolves into a character portrait of a classic modern figure: the uncynical, clueless nymph trying to get by on looks and getting lost in the fringe swamplands of showbiz.
Adriana is never more than a whisper away from flat-out prostitution — except often she gets stuck with the bill, and earns nothing but minor gigs and more sexual offers. The police-lineup of men she becomes entangled with is both paradigmatic and all too convincing, from Jean-Claude Brialy’s silky goldbricker to Nino Manfredi’s amoral press agent, to, unforgettably, Ugo Tognazzi’s crucifyingly pathetic film-biz has-been, tap-dancing to heart attack on a table to amuse a producer, to whom he then tries to pimp out Adriana. With the least affected smile of the era, Sandrelli underplays Adriana’s essential emptiness, as though it were hiding under defensive layers of shame acquired with time and liaisons. She watches everyone with a fake-relaxed wariness, and on several occasions turns and gives the camera a deadeyed glare. When Joachim Fuchsberger, as a pompous writer, scathingly evokes a fatuous and slutty character of his, a distracted Adriana slowly realizes he’s describing her, and the mood of the movie freezes.
175/365: To Be and To Have (Nicholas Philibert, 2002) (Kanopy, Amazon)
A seasonal portrait of schoolhouse life in a rural French village, Philibert’s film revolves around Georges Lopez, an all-purpose teacher of grades K through 6 and quite possibly the most saintly and devoted man to ever take the job. Trim and dashing in turtlenecks and graying Van Dyke, Lopez supplies the children with his unwavering attention, and never raises his voice above a gentle *sotto*. The kids — precocious Marie, emotionally tenuous Olivier, introverted Nathalie, absent-minded imp Jojo, etcetera — might all be stranded in an ignorant bucolic nowhere, but you never fear for them. On Lopez’s watch, at least, they’re an extraordinarily fortunate tribe, and they seem to know it, responding to their mentor’s civil patience in kind.
The film, which drew doc-record crowds in France, never pretends the camera is invisible, and you suspect that maybe Lopez could be less saintly when the crew isn’t shooting. But doubts fade with time spent in the children’s presence — the magical dynamic we witness, of recitations and math problems and disciplinary chats and vocabulary drills, all of it performed with exacting sympathy and focus, is genuine to the touch. Derived from a conjugation lesson, Philibert’s title is simple enough to cause spillways of interpretation, a reflex the film itself invites as well. Although it’s full of observed life, Philibert’s movie is a bit of a vacuum, and once we register our admiration for Lopez, we can hardly help contemplating the cold equations of the students’ futures, their uneducated families and the rapturously desolate farmland around them. When Lopez delicately announces his retirement, it’s accepted in class with equanimity — only we are aware of the potential for darker days ahead.
Year Four 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
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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