Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 30
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
204/365: Two English Girls (Francois Truffaut, 1971) (Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Apple TV)
Truffaut’s masterpiece, and too often forgotten thanks to memories of Jules and Jim — but whereas that earlier, snazzier film basks in sensual nostalgia and objectifies Jeanne Moreau’s bipolar vixen just as the eponymous men do, this more ambitious film is an analytical examination of romantic destruction that often plays like the best Edith Wharton adaptation she never wrote. Its cool narrative formalities barely disguise an epic ardor for the tragedies of ephemeral love and youth. Adapted, like Jules and Jim, from a semi-autobiographical novel by Henri-Pierre Roche, the movie inverts the earlier story’s set-up — here, it’s 1902, and young intellectual Frenchman Claude Roc (Jean-Pierre Leaud) meets young Englishwoman Anne (Kika Markham), and is soon invited to vacation at her family Welsh manse with her mother and her sister Muriel (Stacy Tendeter). There the three teens quickly bond, with both sisters nudging the eligible bachelor towards the other and trying to be all modern — as the three overanalyze each other and their own feelings, waiting for thunderbolts and sweeping passions that don’t arrive (but then do, but not soon or intensely enough), indecision becomes reflexive, and the story becomes a kind of anti-romance, in which nothing but folly and disappointment is destined, and love is so mythologized that it proves disastrously elusive.
Then years pass, and Claude matures and bounces from one unjealous sister to the other, with the story being told rather masterfully via their letters and stories they tell each other and copious narration, all of it fusing into a kind of sympathetic but faux-clinical vision of life and love hobbled by “modernist” ideals (among them, “free love”). It’s a seemingly stoic film, but the accumulation of woe and regret is devastating, and while the action seems sober and suppressed, the Georges Delerue score sobs. Truffaut exercised a restraint and delicacy here that’s missing in most of his other work — it’s as close as he ever got to the potent rigor of Bresson or the just-the-facts poetic plainness of Rossellini. The cast is uniformly excellent, given the contents-under-pressure style; we should not underestimate the contribution of Leaud, whose tense canine watchfulness carries the dramatic current of the film as clearly as the dialogue. The lovely imagery, by way of master cinematographer Nestor Almendros, evokes the Impressionist moment by capturing the movement’s ardor for transient beauty, and its implicit mourning over the unstoppable passing of time.
205/365: White Hunter, Black Heart (Clint Eastwood, 1990) (Vudu, HBO Max, Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon)
A fictionalized Hollywood saga that takes a steady bead on American imperialist chutzpah and pumps one bullet after another into the blubber, Eastwood’s film adapts the novel by Peter Viertel, about his time as the writer of The African Queen (1951), in Africa, with a megalomanic John Huston. Here, the Huston figure is the notorious iconoclast rebelling against the moneymen, seeking out heedless adventure, and stubbornly exploiting the troubled on-location production in order to indulge his dream of shooting an elephant. Amid the simulacra of Humphrey Bogart (Richard Vanstone), Katharine Hepburn (Marisa Berenson), producer Sam Spiegel (George Dzundza), et al., Eastwood’s Wilson is an inscrutable ass, a selfish, creepy, grandstanding psycho who thinks he’s larger than life but is really merely foolhardy and narcissistic. It’s as potent a dressing down of the man’s-man Hemingway paradigm as American movies have ever offered. Eastwood’s performance is instrumental in this effect: he nails Huston’s long-voweled drawl but his voice has none of the real man’s booming depth. Neither is Eastwood half the vivacious personality that Huston seemed to have been, and so the effect — which may well have actually been very close to others’ experience of Huston on the ground — is of a brat of a man calcified into meaningless anti-authoritarian posturing, and quite possibly lost in a movie in his own head.
This is deliberate, and the key to the movie’s thrust — the idea Wilson has of himself as the great “white hunter” is a destructive fantasy, and tell-tale symptom of colonialist thinking. He postpones and ignores everything once production is supposed to begin, in order to grab his opportunity to perform the monstrous “sin” of killing Earth’s largest land animal with a single thunderous shot in the head. Which he never quite ends up doing — without giving too much away, Wilson gets what he wants and then doesn’t and then gets far too much. It’s an odd thing — the film competes at every turn with our own memories of The African Queen, Huston, Bogart, etc., and ends up feeling like a pale imitation. Which seems deliberate, too. Not quite a character study Eastwood’s movie is more like an essay on oppressive culture clash, some of it conscientiously irritating, just like its antihero, and all of it leading up to the final moments, and a single final shot and a single final bit of dialogue — “Action” — that might be the best and most mysterious piece of acting Eastwood has ever done.
206/365: Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss (Felix Moeller, 2010) (Kanopy, Kino Now, Amazon)
A Nazi doc, but a movie about movies — specifically, it’s about the most notorious Third Reich film made in the spirit of Nazi anti-Semitism, Veit Harlan’s Jew Suss (1940), a virulent piece of xenophobic cinema, a period drama set in the 1700s in which the presence of Jews in German culture is explicitly, relentlessly depicted as nothing less than a pestilence. It’s based on fact: Joseph Suss Oppenheimer was a real moneylender who was ultimately railroaded by embittered business rivals and executed on trumped-up charges in 1738. But for Harlan, Joseph Goebbels & Co., Oppenheimer was an opportunity, and so in this notorious version he is depicted as a slavering, felonious, hook-nosed sex criminal-archvillain who must be stopped at all costs, and who is a scourge sufficient to galvanize the film’s post-Reformation society against Jewry in general.
Moeller’s documentary skims over the fascinating Oppenheimer legacy in favor of Veit Harlan himself, an energetic go-getter and would-be actor who was clearly larger than life, netting several movie star wives (his last, Kristina Soderbaum, was the most popular German movie star from the mid-‘30s to the ‘50s), and lording it over ambitious German productions like a Teutonic Cecil B. deMille. Harlan’s life pivoted on Jew Suss — after the war, he became something of a pariah in German society, still making films but also proclaiming publicly that he’d been forced to make the film, a claim few Germans, in their own long fog of incomprehensible guilt, could believe. What Harlan meant to the culture he thrived in and then was reviled by is densely illustrated by Moeller’s web of interviews, predominantly with Harlan’s four surviving children (one daughter committed suicide in 1989) and six grandchildren, whose entire lives have been marked in large and small ways by Harlan’s public profile and by the shadow of Jew Suss. The younger generation have wrestled with merely being Harlans in a country that will not forget the name, but a fringe benefit Moeller’s film offers up is the realization that Jan Harlan, for decades Stanley Kubrick’s producer, was Veit Harlan’s nephew. He met the young Jewish Bronx-native filmmaker during the shooting of Paths of Glory, as did Jan’s sister Christiane, who acted in the film and later married Kubrick. Christiane is here, looking lovely, telling of her introducing Kubrick to Harlan at her home, a meeting for which Kubrick was nervous but which you’d imagine had a degree of frisson for Harlan as well.
207/365: Get Carter (Mike Hodges, 1971) (WatchTCM, Vudu, Amazon)
The premier authentic cult film to several generations of post-Beatles Brit movieheads, Hodges’s debut feature is by now much more than a mere movie — it is a touchstone, one of the key experiences in British film, a movie that carries with it now, helplessly, the national cargo of memory, influence and generational cache it has acquired over the years and in the eyes of innumerable English filmgoers. Its simple mobster-revenge scenario was executed realistically, and with a startling degree of mundane viciousness, unceremoniously revealed and therefore all the more disquieting. These was not the urbane, dryly humorous crooks of the older heist films, these were the sociopathic, semi-educated, perfectly mercenary gangsters of the headlines, the kind that screw up and leave corpses in the wrong places and kill rather than lose profit, the kind Martin Scorsese was just beginning to explore on these shores. Michael Caine plays Carter, a London hitman who trains it back to his hometown of Newscastle to bury, and avenge, his brother. Virtually everyone he meets takes him for a city mouse in over his head amid the northern town’s criminal element, but Carter is cagey and mission-driven, and soon enough he begins playing one sleazeball off of another, assassinating some, setting up others with the police, all of it executed with the laconic cruelty of a slaughterhouse worker.
His brother’s murder agitates him, but Carter is finally moved to homicidal action by the revelation that his young niece — which may actually be his own biological daughter — was forced to participate in a porn loop, under the auspices of the local mob. After that, social norms and decorum are tossed and nobody, not even the relatively guilt-free girlfriends of crooks, is inviolate. Caine’s Carter is the classic postmodern man of action, self-possessed but not urbane, attractive but full of untold menace, fearless but destined to die by the sword. Caine in his prime was closer to the give-nothing-away-then-explode acting thesis of Toshiro Mifune than to an ordinary Englishman; the essence of his early stardom was embodied in his half-lidded reserve.
But most of all, Get Carter is a product of the 1970s, when cinematography could evoke the smell of a bitter winter wind, when movie stars were more interesting than merely beautiful, when facing a grim and doomed reality was a stirring and marketable truth, not a buzz-killing bummer. The legend of the Hodges’s film continues to grow — 28 years after its release, when it appalled the British censors, a British Film Institute poll on the top 100 best-ever British films saw Get Carter claim slot number 16, far ahead of Chariots of Fire, Dr. Zhivago and Performance.
208/365: Voyage in Time (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983) (YouTube, SovietMoviesOnline, Mubi)
Non-masterpieces have their place: you may thought Andrei Tarkovsky made only those seven features he’s famous for, from Ivan’s Childhood (1962) to The Sacrifice (1986). This off-hand documentary, co-made with screenwriter Tonino Guerra for Italian TV, follows Tark as he is self-exiled finally from the Soviet Union and languishing in Italy with Guerra, as they both nurse a long, ruminative, locale-hunting gestation chunk of pre-production for Nostalghia in 1983. Burdened with a dull and redundant title (it should’ve ben translated from the Italian as the slightly more suggestive Time Traveling), the film is a rare oddity for the Tarkovskiite, at times pretentious, but valuable as a casual (if not spontaneous) portrait of the man at work, trying to articulate his desires for the as-yet-unmade film, and also often not even attempting to. Dislocation is everything: Tarkovsky’s apparently lost in the relentless Mediterranean sun, outside of Russia, despite having been perpetually at odds with his home country for his entire career, nurturing a universalist-cum-spiritual perspective that he nevertheless saw as Russian and struggled to make universal in his own head.
There’s a lot of landscape here (never as spacious as Russia in Tarkovsky’s films, of course; he clearly did not like densely populated areas, and never made an urban film), and bits of the old pals swapping discomfitures (the two “trade compliments like prostitutes,” Guerra snorts, and Tarkovsky rolls his eyes), and Tarkovsky even admits that Solaris is “not so good,” for being a genre film. Voyage in Time is a completist’s requirement, even if the last thing you want from a timeless, technology-less, transcendental zone-trip like Nostalgia is a better understanding of exactly how Tarkovsky worked his magic, and even if the American subtitlers didn’t quite understand that when Tarkovsky discusses Antonioni’s “adventure,” he means L’Avventura.
209/365: No Mercy, No Future (Helena Sanders-Brahms, 1981) (Mubi)
The fiery, dogged, despairing feminist voice of the New German Cinema, Sanders-Brahms is an all-but-unknown figure here, despite having had a few of her films distributed to American theaters. Deep into her career she remains an unrepentant New Waver, montaging and jump-cutting and metafictionalizing all over the place, from the feminized Godardianisms of Under the Pavement Lies the Strand (1974), to the autobiographical Germany, Pale Mother (1980), in which Eva Mattes plays Sanders’s mother, left alone (as so many of the filmmaker’s women are) during WWII, and forced to trek across the landscape away from the carnage with the child on her back. No Mercy, No Future is a leaner and scarifying world apart — a relentless odyssey endured by a schizophrenic young woman, who abandons her helpless upper-crust family and hits the streets of Berlin, the ultimate lost soul, looking for Jesus (so she says) but finding only men ready to exploit her.
In a classic, show-it-all acting coup that doesn’t wriggle free of your memory very easily, the cataclysmically anemic Elisabeth Stepanek has a genuine, disturbing lostness, and her wastrel is an extreme case gravitationally attracting larger significances; practically every abuse and suffering a woman can endure in the western world falls between her legs. The heroine is a clueless lamb in an endless landscape of wolves and weasels. Rape is a given, and in Sanders-Brahms’s view not as harmful as emotional manipulation and romantic deceit. Certainly, the most appalling scene involves a horny immigrant man who ostensibly wants to marry her; he insists on sex too soon after an abortion, and the resulting debacle almost impossible to watch. Shouldn’t it be? This is not a movie that goes gentle into the night of feminist outrage.
210/365: Billy the Kid (Jennifer Venditti, 2007) (Tubi, Kanopy, Vudu, Amazon, Vimeo)
It’s not difficult to simply view Venditti’s adroit and honest doc as merely a sympathetic portrait of a working-class high school kid inflicted with Asperger’s. You can, if you insist on doing so, take it clinically, or as yet another small-framed non-fiction slice of life bearing with it a fashionable special-needs public issue. Too bad about Billy P., a 15-year-old Maine kid living in a converted mobile home with his remarried mom, remembering an abusive father, and mixing uncomfortably with his neurotypical teenage contemporaries in school, who largely tolerate him but keep him at arm’s length. Billy himself is a lively piece of work, chattering endlessly from a headful of old movies and entertaining dreams of being a rock star, but you need only watch his tense body language and searching eyes for a few seconds to understand that he’s disconnected, that he cannot mesh with everyday human society.
But rather mysteriously, Venditti’s movie evolves into a different kind of experience. Simply put, as we’re forced to immerse ourselves in Billy’s daily struggle rather than ignore him like we might if we found ourselves behind him on line at McDonald’s, he becomes more than just a kid with a handicap — he becomes an iconic figure, a walking-talking representation of adolescent traumas. It’s hazardous thinking of handicapped individuals this way, and Venditti doesn’t do very much to encourage our thinking. But Billy does, and in his wake Asperger’s becomes more than just a disorder, but a living metaphor for our own tribulations growing up, trying to navigate an overwhelming world, attempting to find love and friendship and having to nurse the scars alone when we fail. Once you go there, Billy’s indomitability becomes stirring. (In an essay about the film, Miranda July wrote, “by the end of the movie it seemed to me that Billy was a superhero…”) It’s true: as Billy creates, out of sheer force of will, a romance with a 16-year-old diner waitress inflicted with nystagmus, and then confronts its collapse, Venditti’s film becomes almost unbearably triumphalist, an anthemic paean to awkward teenagers everywhere.
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, 29
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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