Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 29
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
197/365: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, 2002) (Vudu, Tubi, Kanopy, Amazon)
One of the key films that got the Korean New Wave globally noticed back at the turn of the century, Park’s epic feel-bad saga has the inexorable plot gears and the sense of doom of a Greek tragedy, and still overshadows the rest of his filmography, even Oldboy a year later. The plot follows the horribly falling dominos nudged over by a young deaf-mute metal worker who, seeking only to obtain a donor kidney for his dying sister, decides to kidnap a preschooler. What happens thereafter is a soberly-judged cascade that’s as much Euripdes as it is James M. Cain in spirit (and includes, in one of his first star-making roles, New Wave axiom Song Kang-ho), but with a touch of Wile E. Coyote narrative circularity to convince us of karma’s inescapable payload. Nothing in Park’s films is simple; seemingly righteous actions always come strapped to their own dynamite-bundles of unintended consequences.
In Park’s realm (always co-written with others, by the way, but written with a suspension bridge’s architectural wisdom), violence is a personalized toxifying plume that spreads from perp to victim to survivor and avenging angel. To say more would spoil surprises; just trust Park’s taste for the throat. The film — the first of a loose “vengeance” trilogy, followed by Oldboy and Lady Vengeance (2005) — is composed and shot with a diamond-cutter’s eye and fisherman’s patience, and may be some kind of sad masterpiece.
198/365: Carosello Napoletano (Ettore Gianini, 1954) (DailyMotion, RaiPlay)
A banquet-sized fried-sugar confection from postwar days of pop Italian cinema, a swirling “city symphony” featuring a young Sophia Loren amidst a fiery ensemble, which played in the US to presumably thankful Italian-American urban audiences in 1961, and sells itself on nothing more than Italian elan. Incarnated as a kind of Neapolitan answer to An American in Paris and The Red Shoes, the movie is an expressionist, ambitious scramble of commedia dell’arte, opera and interpretive ballet, predominantly celebrating the canzone Napoletana, the city’s traditional ballad form (reaching officially back to the 1830s) most famous for overfamiliar songs like “O Sole Mio” and “Funiculi Funicula,” both of which are in the film, in what might be definitive versions. The Pathecolor ambience belongs to the postwar urban peasantry still immersed in traditional art (street theater and Pulcinella figures are everywhere) and the timeless sagas of their fishing-folk ancestors. There’s a thread of a story (a street minstrel and his family search for lodgings on Christmas Eve), but there’re scores of stories within the story, often tales of tragic love that make high-octane Italian songs, all played out in an elaborate theatrical Naples with a painted Vesuvius in the background. Ripe and lush, the film won a prize at Cannes back when “International Prizes” were dished out, one to every contributing nation, but beyond that minor notation, it’s slipped off the grid of film history. Just for the raw showmanship it delivers, here’s to welcoming it back.
199/365: Kz (Rex Bloomstein, 2005) (GuideDoc)
No matter how long you live, and how many Holocaust documentaries you’ve endured, you should never be seduced by the impression that you’ve seen it all; the Nazi phenomenon was apparently almost cosmic in its limitless and deathless ability to remanifest itself as jaw-dropping news, even 60 years later. One of the most original and philosophically fluent documentaries on the subject ever made, this film casts a gimlet eye on not only the mass exterminations but the ways they are considered today — not in films, but on the ground. We begin on an opulent cruise trip up the Danube, from which we board a tour bus to Mauthausen, Austria, on which a guide plainly tells us that industrialization in Austria at large only began around 1938, and was a product of concentration camp slave labor. Then, the well-dressed, well-fed, middle-class new-millennium tourists disembark for a guided tour of the most notorious death camp in Austria.
Bloomstein keeps quiet for most of the film, simply filming the calm, saturnine, hypnotic lecturers (many of them young men with SS grandfathers) as they matter-of-factly regale crowd after crowd of international vacationers with the grueling minutiae of what one calls the “stations of life” of a Mauthausen inmate. We also spy openly at the observers, mostly American high schoolers in their push-up bras and eye-liner and designer couture, who mostly go white and sometimes grow faint from what they hear. (We spot a serious but kitschy young couple take snapshots of each other by the open ovens.) What coalesces is the legacy of unempathizable, emaciated humanity the Nazis left behind, impossible to fathom but, as time goes by, more and more appallingly folded in with the other elements of our everyday culture. One might visit Mauthausen to learn about the functioning of evil, but our quotidian comfort and complacency remain unaffected — even the showerheads have been stolen as souvenirs.
With Mauthausen now a happy suburb, with its own MacDonald’s and touristy beer garden (enjoyed today much as it was during the war by the SS), virtually every image is a chilling, ironic mini-movie worthy of an encyclopedic Umberto Eco unpacking, down to the Holocaust-culture insistence by the filmed tourists to mourn Jews (“Anyone know Kaddish?” one German woman asks of the crowd), even though the guides explicitly say that Mauthausen’s hundreds of thousands of victims were overwhelmingly Poles, Catholics, Russians, homosexuals, and criminals. But of course Mauthausen, for the visitors as well as the film’s audience, represents “the camps” as well as merely itself, and what we know about the Holocaust is nothing today if not representation: numbers, photographs, movies, testimony.
200/365: Highway Patrolman (Alex Cox, 1991) (Kino Now, Apple TV, Amazon)
Cox’s North American-made films — Repo Man, Walker, Straight to Hell, Highway Patrolman — taken together scan like a travelling roadshow through the jittery outskirts of an American proto-world dizzy with its own death wishes. A cheap, Spanish-language Bildungsfilm furiously entangled in its own ethical netting, the last of the four focuses on Pedro (Roberto Sosa), a young stripling of a career officer fresh out of the Academy, an idealistic professional tyro of the sort we’re used to seeing learn the ropes the hard way. Plagued a devotion to the law that is soon mangled beyond repair by his experiences on the job, Pedro is assigned to isolated stretches of Durango highway, and quickly adapts to the fluctuating morality of the Mexican road. Almost immediately Pedro finds himself accepting bribes from small businesspeople instead of stopping their livelihood dead by enforcing petty laws; in a rather Coxian flourish, his first true bribe, from a pig trucker with rotting cargo, is accompanied by the butchering of a diseased carcass by starving locals.
After being reassigned to a shitty route for not writing enough tickets, being shot (endowing him with a permanent limp), and totaling his patrol car and having it replaced with a dilapidated heap, Pedro begins to come apart at the seams, finally exercising his authoritarian right of force on an insubordinative kid driver who turns out to be the Governor’s son. Danger is never far; the geography is pure road movie badland, the requisite American roadside attractions replaced by their more desolate Mexican brethren: children selling iguanas on the highway shoulder, Day of the Dead iconography, drug dealer’s helicopters, dead pigs. Shot in protracted, handheld single takes, Cox’s film concludes with neither carpet nihilism nor redemptive happy ending, but with self-empowerment outside the boundaries of the law.
201/365: Joy House (Rene Clement, 1964) (Mubi)
Clement’s rather delightful suspenser (titled Les Felins, but retitled in the US after the American pulp paperback it was based on, by prolific noiriste Day Keene) is not an earth-shaker, but merely a spiffy programmer: graceful, relaxed, fun-loving, unpretentious. What you get is Alain Delon in his best persona — a ne’er-do-well playboy flitting around the Mediterranean looking for cash and ass, not unlike his Tom Ripley in Clement’s Purple Noon four years earlier. He’s targeted by a jealous American gangster and escapes into the opulent Riviera clutches of icy widow Lola Albright (a stunning blonde from Akron whose resume is otherwise comprised of cheap westerns and episodic TV), and her dewy, bubbly cousin-cum-maid, played by a pristine 26-year-old Jane Fonda, at the onset of her French phase. Delon’s hired as a chauffeur — the kind whose driving is seriously impeded by his penchant for hiding under the steering wheel whenever gangsters walk by — but both the chateau-owning widow and the adorable but possibly unhinged kewpie doll have other cat-&-mouse plans for the wandering hunk, and it’s got to do with murder, swapped identities, set-ups, and so on.
It’s the kind of American pulp French filmmakers have always loved: the kind in which not one character has an iota of honesty or morality to them. This is pure escapism, hanging in an absurd vacation-France inhabited by nuns and sex kittens, digging the redoubtable chemistry between Fonda and Delon, enjoying the stars’ indulgent wallow in the Riviera as we also casually and effortlessly following the not-too-fast narrative without the benefit of a single moment where the film insists on “making” us “feel” the action. (When an on-the-run Delon hazardously flags down a passing truck, Clement hangs back and just watches the actor literally leap on the grill.) Joy House is not a great film (it’s not as rich as the Patricia Highsmith-derived Purple Noon), but it’s pure movieness, un-self-important and respectful, from the day when movies could be just movies, not events.
202/365: Shame (Ingmar Bergman, 1968) (Criterion Channel, Apple TV, Vudu, YouTube, Amazon)
Gritty, tormentous and supple, Bergman’s war film is an apolitical homefront horrorshow where life in wartime slowly shifts from a state of petty complacency to, literally, drifting in a sea of corpses. Focusing exclusively on the manner in which domestic war unsettles and corrupts the lives of civilians, the film hones in on Liv Ullman and Max Von Sydow as a painfully average, childless couple who run a small farm in the hinterlands of some unnamed European country. “I think it is awful when church bells ring on an ordinary day,” Von Sydow says thoughtlessly as the two of them pack their car with berries to sell in town, and he has no idea how awful awful can be. Once they begin their odyssey from the outskirts into the belly of the beast, it’s apparent to both them and us that nothing could’ve prepared them for the experience of seeing society fall down around their ears. The portents of war — rumors, drafts, stories circulating around town about concentration camps — escalate into the stuff of nightmares when jets fly low over the Rosenberg homestead, and the nearby forest explodes into flames. Their farm smack dab in the middle of a spastic LZ littered with dead paratroopers hanging from trees, Ullman and Von Sydow hit the road further into the madness (where the biological-clock-wise Ullman discovers a neighbor’s dead children), repeatedly forced to circle back to their wartorn farm No Exit-style.
The war is purposefully generic: there’s no good or bad sides, no talk of politics or motivations, just conflict seen from the ground level, where borders and fronts are invisible, and anyone with a gun is capable of acting out his own idea of prairie justice. Ullman and Von Sydow’s journey to the end of night wreaks havoc on both their marriage and their identities — whereas she is systematically disempowered by the anarchy, he graduates from being a blithering coward to a ruthless, looking-out-for-number-one survivalist, ready and willing to leave his wife behind if that’s what it takes to escape the no man’s land alive. Finally, the series of desperate transactions, humiliations and trials the couple endures leads them to a captain-less fishing boat drifting through the Baltic, which, in Bergman’s most expressive image, is stuck nightmarishly in a mile-wide current of floating soldier carcasses.
Pure as a war film can get — that is, unsullied by prejudices, rationalizations or knee-jerking — Shame is Bergman at his most blistering. With beautiful gray-on-gray cinematography by Sven Nykvist, it’s a universal yet miniature vision of ordinary life run amok and under fire — apocalypse on the half-shell.
203/365: Klimt (Raul Ruiz, 2006) (Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon)
Ruiz, with his 75th or so film, in an oeuvre that hopscotches from historical epic to experimental lark, offers a conventionally unconventional portrait of Austrian history, plunging into the Art Nouveau era and his titular hero’s biography as if into a love pit full of nymphomaniacs. Klimt, by most accounts, was a prickly artiste who painted a lot, bickered a bit with the Viennese art-world institutions, had a few relationships, and then died of pneumonia. But in Ruiz’s version he was a rabid, anti-social progressive constantly being seduced in two-way-mirrored rooms by naked women, and getting into spats with stuffy society types in crowded dining rooms. (Little mention is made of the Vienna Secession, an organizing effort that would’ve required a measure of social diplomacy, tact and camaraderie on the artist’s part.) Ruiz also implies, rather surrealistically, that Klimt (played with shrugging distraction by John Malkovich, in a sea of European accents) went insane, or at least delusional, toward the end of his life.
As a film it’s a lush, ridiculous fantasy of an artsy, cliched Mitteleuropa that never quite existed (brothels full of mustachioed women, a bulging-eyed Egon Schiele, played by Klaus Kinski scion Nikolai) peopled by symbolic personages (dream muse Saffron Burrows, nameless bureaucrat Stephen Dillane), all revolving around Klimt as if he were a walking martyr for misunderstood geniuses everywhere. Like many of Ruiz’s films (not, it should be said, his magisterial version of Proust, Time Regained), it’s a ripe lark, thick with dream interpolations and Euro-opulence of the old school.
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, 27, 28
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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