Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 27
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
183/365: Regular Lovers (Phillipe Garrel, 2005) (Mubi)
Ah, Paris in May ’68, when the student strikes broke out and burned all the more brightly the more they were suppressed by police violence, when labor unions joined in and virtually shut the country down, and when Molotov-cocktail revolt filled the middle-class streets in a heretofore unprecedented Zeitgeist of resistance to the exploitations of state power. The moment awaited its definitive film portrait until the arrival of Garrel’s film, though it is in fact more of an impressionistic personal meditation on the place and time than an outright historical film. But the feeling of the era, the cataclysmic, romantic, liberating, and finally tragically disillusioned emotional thrust of *resistance*, coupled with the electric sense of being 19, sexually alive, responsibility-free, and ready to dope up and drop out — all of it seeps out of this neglected three-hour epic like fragrance from a valley of lilacs.
Garrel, of course, had been there — having begun as a young experimental filmmaker in the ’60s, he rode shotgun along with the New Wavers (literally, in 1968 at the age of 19, shooting scenes in the streets with Godard). Regular Lovers has the burning conviction of firsthand experience, and it’s hardly a coincidence that Garrel cast his own son, Louis, as his laconic, lovelorn protagonist. The film meanders in the young Garrel’s shadow, as he wanders through a demimonde of wealthy college kids and, soon enough, the Night of the Barricades, filmed in inky black-&-white by master DP William Lubtchansky in a nearly hour-long idyll, as if the revolution was caught in suspended animation. From there, the film evokes the post-revolutionary hangover, as Garrel’s Francoise begins a wary romance with Lilie (the radiantly ordinary Clothilde Hesme); together, they are born icons of post-adolescent cool, but just as insurrectionary fervor wanes under the glare of the workaday sun, so does their love. It’s a heartbreaking film, but not because it tells you so. Like the best of the French going back to Renoir, the filmmaker locates three-dimensional pathos and beauty in simple images, acts and gestures, captured honestly and without baloney: a dance party, getting high in a rich family’s apartment, wandering through the strangely empty morning streets as if the couple were the survivors of a holocaust.
184/365: Wings (Larisa Shepitiko, 1966) (Criterion Channel, Mubi)
Luminaries in the Soviet New Wave generation, Shepitko and Elem Klimov were made even more glam by their thorny run-ins with the censorship bureau and, most of all, by Shepitko’s tragic 1979 death in a car wreck, amidst shooting her fifth feature. This film, her first, went unseen for decades, but it’s heartfelt beauty, nothing more in its rather spectacular way than a character portrait of a middle-aged woman (played by beloved character star Maya Bulgakova) caught in a menopausal lostness between her current, lonely and unadventurous life as a headmistress, and her previous life as aviatrix and war heroine.
We find out her whole story only in the end, but meanwhile she’s an indelible character, and we’ve all met her before: proudly professional but unforgiving, silently bitter, capable of being overbearing, holding on to an ill-fitting masculinity, used to dominating the room and controlling her fate but finding out there’s less and less to control the older she gets. It’s the kind of subtle, realistic, uncliched role hungry actors used to get in the New Wave era, and Bulgakova maintains complete control over her regal presence and repressed expressiveness. Still, Shepitko doesn’t rely completely on her star — a flashback passage sees only what the heroine sees, and the ending is, literally, pure, abstracted, unexpected flight. Made when Shepitko was only 28, it’s one of the great movies about women’s lives (that is, not about their place in the lives of men), and a rare exploration of female mid-life crisis — a subject more prescient in Soviet culture, where women were officially encouraged to meet men equally in the tasks of culture and society, than in ours.
185/365: The Bridesmaid (Claude Chabrol, 2004) (Ovid, Kanopy, Fandor, Amazon)
Welcome to Chabrolville, a France of lurking pathologies and lingering homcidality, a consistent terrain even though this film was close to being the aged New Waver’s 60th feature, in a career that stretched from 1958. Given his doggedly consistent fascination with psychotic criminality intersecting with contemporary bourgeois lives, it’s almost surprise to find that it’s only Chabrol’s second adaptation from mystery-doyenne Ruth Rendell’s novel. (1995’s La Ceremonie was the first.) It is, in any case, a psychodrama of typically brisk efficiency and relaxed gallows humor. The semi-functioning family at the center is sketched in — responsible son (with incestuous lurkings) Benoit Magimel, high-spirited single mom Aurore Clement, bickering sisters — before we meet the titular catalyst at a family wedding: Senta (Laura Smet), a sensuous but off-putting seductress with a mysterious past.
Magimel is all pro, nervously deciphering life with his eyes, as the chump who gets vacuumed in by this odd girl’s impulsive devotions and Nietzschean delusions, but Smet, all eyelashes and butterscotch skin, is the film’s prize; she doesn’t act out the character’s slowly revealed pathologies so much as keep them barely contained behind her mesmerizing stare, like mad dogs in a cage. Chabrol sets us up, of course, which is half the fun, and the experience is a delight for lack of pomposity (his visual storytelling remains no-nonsense) as well as matter-of-fact genre expertise.
186/365: The Missing Person (Noah Buschel, 2009) (Vudu, Amazon)
This moody, toast-dry neo-meta-noir might find its MacGuffin in the reverbs from 9/11 — meta-spoiler, kinda — but the movie ends up defying every prejudice. It’s as if Buschel knew we’d be put off first by the noir cliches and then by the backstory, and played the movie so cool, so mysterious, with a slouch toward deadpan comedy that never coalesces into jokes, that the gambit works. First and foremost we get Michael Shannon, the crowned prince of off-kilter, as an anachronistic private dick wearily doing Bogartian shamus crap in a world in which he doesn’t own a computer, he reaches for his rotary-dial phone before his cell, and he can’t get a cab to legally follow another car. Shannon’s unwavering look of heartburn consternation all but carries this wispy indie, as the hero is hired to find a man in Mexico, and of course finds out so much more, a lot of it about himself.
Buschel has only a semi-firm grip on his slippery idea — some stabs at comedy seem too easy (a pair of unorthodox undercover cops trail after Shannon’s dick only to swap sub-Tarantino-esque banter about trivial things), while others land gently (a passing patrolman on a Segway hits the right note). Dark, grainy and regularly lapsing into subjective montages, the film is so cagey about its program that it seems made up largely of disconcerting moods — a strangely silent, night-shadowed Mexican compound, ostensibly an orphanage but without children, seems as odd to Shannon’s grizzled protagonist as it does to us. Eventually, the real scheme is revealed, and since Buschel doesn’t dramatize it, we’re left to piece it together, and use it to retrace the movie in our heads, at which point the movie is not a joke any longer, or a mystery, but simply a tragedy. But maybe all of those old Hammett-Chandler-Bogart detective films were tragedies, too, winding up with a heartful of rue and too many bodies. Maybe the genre isn’t quite through with us.
187/365: Paris vu par… (Six in Paris) (Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jean Rouch, Jean Douchet * Jean-Daniel Pollet, 1965) (Ovid, Amazon, Apple TV)
One of the loveliest freeform ideas to find patronage and popularity in the New Wavey 1960s was the omnibus film, a rarely cohesive but always tempting quasi-genre defined as a collection of exclusively commissioned short films. These projects usually began with a general theme but were always most interested in gathering the generation’s coolest hot-shot filmmakers and encouraging them to make their special kind of havoc, but in compressed form. The aesthetics of the genre are questionable — never is the entirety of an omnibus very satisfying — but its smash-up ranginess of conflicting styles and potpourri perspectives make the movies irresistible. (Favorites of any connoisseur would include 1962’s The Seven Deadly Sins, 1963’s RoGoPaG, and 1969’s Love and Anger, all of which feature the era’s most promiscuous omnibus-er, Jean-Luc Godard.) This famous example is a classic, hit-the-streets New Wave experiment for producer Barbet Schroeder — six filmmakers, six arrondissements, cheap 16mm cameras, non-pro actors, go. A romantic mistaken-identity dalliance from scholar-semi-New Waver Douchet is forgettable, but that’s followed by Rouch’s survey of a fraying marriage, performed handheld and in one fearless 16-minute take; featuring Schroeder himself and Nadine Ballot, the short’s an O. Henry tale made electric by Rouch’s analytical perspective, especially once Ballot’s prickly wife leaves the apartment and the camera climbs into the elevator with her, the sounds of her hollering husband fading into the distance.
Comedy-maker Pollet creates an amusingly procrastinative hooker-&-john scenario, featuring his frequent lead, the astonishingly Keatonesque Claude Melki, while Rohmer was handed the Place de l’Etoile and the Arc de Triomphe, and so his wry perambulation takes the form of that torturous intersection, as pedestrians and cars do battle, Parisians try to ignore the tourist monument in the middle, and a lone middle-class clerk navigates an unstable urban world. Chabrol wages an all-out attack on a petit bourgeois family as the mother and philandering father (played by Chabrol and his wife Stephane Audran, not a non-pro) eat and bicker and eat some more, and their rebellious son contrives ways to subvert them and finally to shut them out altogether. And Godard chimes in with one of his least characteristic pieces — the travails of a girl stuck between two lovers, both of whom are abusive louts, farcically so obsessed with their rhyming mechanical vocations (metallurgic action sculpture, auto body work) that they cannot even acknowledge her when she begs for sex. Shot by Albert Maysles, the short looks more like Grey Gardens than Pierrot le Fou. But the coalescent upshot of the collection is as both a fascinating time capsule and a New Wave primer, prioritizing the fleeting textures of life over story, and making the real places in which characters find themselves epically vital.
188/365: Gentlemen Broncos (Jared Hess, 2009) (YouTube, Vudu, Amazon, Apple TV)
Almost universally deplored, Hess’s follow-up to Napoleon Dynamite isn’t a failure — it’s just different, like an idiot child who dresses funny or a spinster who names all of her cats the same, and the film’s idiosyncratic personality simply seemed to rub most people the wrong way. Like the earlier film, the movie doesn’t explore all-American geekdom so much as drop you into alien territory and let you fend for yourself, but this time, the terrain isn’t just a high school in the quirky midlands, and we don’t have Jon Heder’s toothsome monster nebbish to laugh at. It’s all quite a bit stranger. Parse this plot arc: our hero, Benjamin (Michael Angarano), is a nervous, penniless home-schooled Utah kid who lives in a geodesic-dome house with his cretinous nightgown-designing mother (Jennifer Coolidge), and who writes sci-fi fantasy fiction with titles like Yeast Lords, and who is befriended by a dim-witted thug/”guardian angel” with a loose-boweled white python (Mike White), and who goes off to a fantasy-writers’ camp and gets his handwritten novel stolen by a ludicrously pompous sci-fi author (Jemaine Clement), even as a hack filmmaker in Salt Lake City decides to make it into a no-budget video…
You’re never sure here what the hell is being made fun of, but the fact is, it’s funny in a bizarre non-sequitur-saturated kind of way. Meanwhile, we’re offered vivid mini-movie depictions throughout of Yeast Lords (subtitled, for reasons known only to Hess, “The Bronco Years”) as it presumably appears in its author’s mind’s eye, complete with taxidermied-deer battle-bots, dune-buggy cyclops armies, fluorescent skies, a running interstellar contention about yeast (which is sometimes vomited up in defensive pink geysers), and Sam Rockwell as a Texas-accented mountain man/space warrior. Who knows. Some satire finds recognizable targets — I’ve never been to a fantasy-writers camp, but Hess’s rip through this terrarium’s norms and gestures is a riot, and Clement, with his lizard eyes and plummy what-is-that-accent, shreds the pretentious William Gibson-Neil Gaiman-Alan Moore pulp demigod into little pieces. It’s hard not to like Hess’ eccentric thing, because you never know what it’ll throw at you, and because genuine eccentricity in Hollywood comedies is as uncommon as genuine wit.
189/365: The Last Bolshevik (Chris Marker, 1993) (Ovid, Mubi, Amazon)
An integral soldier in the French New Wave, Marker is famous here mostly for La Jetee (1962), the beloved all-stills time-travel mega-short that was remade by Terry Gilliam as 12 Monkeys. Though he remained a prolific manufacturer of cinema into his 80s, he was never a meta-acrobat like Godard and Resnais and Rivette, nor a romantic ironist like Truffaut or Rohmer or Demy; tangents aside, Marker’s mode was always the personal documentary — a non-fictional amble between political fact and subjective, and often poetical, observation, and over the years it’s become, under the oblivious noses of the filmgoing world, one of the medium’s most insightful, humane and profound strategies. Marker’s like Godard and Kiarostami in that filmmaking isn’t his career but his life, woven inextricably into his daily routines, ruminations, friendships and memories. Thus, his movies don’t have the mouth-feel of traditional entertainment or even of agenda-structured docs, but of personal correspondence, open-ended and imperative and exploratory.
This epic doc is a magisterial biopic of Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin, arranged by Marker as series of first-person “letters” to the late giant, who followed the Eisenstein-Vertov-Dovshenko-Pudovkin cataract and thereafter suffered whatever totalitarian crap was thrown his way just so he could make movies. A good deal of the celluloid Medvedkin shot was on the “film train,” a crazy, egalitarian form of movie production in which Medvedkin and a large crew drove a development-lab-equipped train around the USSR, shooting and printing films on the spot, showing them to the peasants they’d filmed, and then often discarding the celluloid thereafter. Marker was friends with Medvedkin (he’d introduced the Russian’s forgotten work to the West in 1971), and saw him as a kind of last man standing of Soviet history, born at the beginning of the century and dead just a few years before the empire fell. And so amid the movie’s Russian-film-history interviews and film clips, there are intimate reminiscences, fond reconsiderations of the past, and Marker’s distinctive detours, drawing parallels and tendril-like connections between images and occurences that always appeared to be disconnected. It may have the rhythm and vibe of an ordinary, if affectionate, documentary, but when it’s over you take away the overwhelming sense of having lived a new history.
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, 25, 26
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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