Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 31
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
211/365: From Mayerling to Sarajevo (Max Ophuls, 1940) (Filmin)
Ophuls remains revered for his densely-layered postwar sand castles of love and irony, and as a result his international resume through the ’30s is often overlooked — if seen at all. This 1940 rarity, released in France nine days before the Germans began their assault and occupation, is quite apparently an Ophuls-for-hire quickie, and the only film depiction of the devout but royal-protocol-vexed romance between the Hapsburg dynasty’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand (American politician-to-be John Lodge) and his underclass Czech-countess love Sophie Chotek (Edwige Feulliere), in the century’s first years and heading toward the triggering of WWI. The modern era looms, as the Empire’s unrest builds, the spontaneous eve of war approaches, and Lodge’s earnest Franz becomes a black sheep for both his love life and progressive ideas. We know, long before Franz’s Oswald shows up, that it doesn’t end well, of course (neither does the movie, really, with a blurting of anti-Nazi propaganda), but Ophuls finds crazy lavishness and poetry in the Empire trappings, and excels in detailing the dreary, humiliating absurdity of court life. Assembled like there was no time to lose, the movie is nevertheless distinctly Ophulsian, taking great grace with spaces and character, and allowing Feulliere to charm our pants right off. For Ophulsians, it’s a necessity.
212/365: The Brothers Grimm (Terry Gilliam, 2016) (Hulu, Vudu, HBO Now, Amazon, YouTube)
A daffy, genre-hash gambol, descendent of the Hammer Film school (if those B-sides had ever been made with money and talent) and just as fabulously cartoon-Gothic as Sleepy Hollow, Gilliam’s film has a conceit that reads like second-nature: Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm (Matt Damon and Heath Ledger), steeped in lore and weathering life in Prussia during the Napoleonic occupation, work as scam-artist ghostbusters for outlying villages troubled by superstition or crop blight or a particularly dark patch of forest. Until, of course, they are apprehended by the French and forced to investigate genuine child disappearances in a remote hamlet chockablock with Gilliam-esque filth, farm animal clutter, rag-dressed peasants and wobbly Tudor architecture.
Gilliam-istes should anticipate an experience more akin to Jabberwocky than Brazil; Gilliam and screenwriter Ehren Krueger maintain a bald air of school-kid gimcrackery, folding in iconography from over a dozen fairy tales but striving to make a girl in a red-hooded shawl or a stack of mattresses or a long-haired princess trapped in a high tower ordinary within the film’s Arthur Rackham-ish world. Wolves and hostile flora are prevalent concerns. Torturing Germans by applying land snails to their faces and hanging the brothers upside down over boiling something-or-other, Jonathan Pryce’s grinning, foppish French general is virtually a brother to John Cleese’s Holy Grail turret-dweller. Damon, as the scheming, cynical Grimm with 1971 sideburns, is an able-bodied straight-man, while Ledger, as the dreamer of the family, swan-dives into the movie with complete abandon — he doesn’t seem to be quite aware he’s in a Gilliam film and can cram tongue in cheek.
The filmmaker’s tendencies, running back to Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s on-location medieval chill, have always been rather Grimm, and this movie adroitly conjures a thoroughly unidealized children’s-lit past, full of phobic nastiness and ridiculous mayhem. The magical mutation of a horse into a boy-swallowing juggernaut has a queasy concreteness to it, and another sorcerous invasion — the mud at the bottom of the town’s well consumes another child and struggles to transform into a gingerbread boy — is positively Svankmajer-esque. It’s difficult not to relish Gilliam’s devotion to tangibility; at least half of what is digitizable in Grimm — shot as it was entirely in the Czech Republic — is in fact set design and props. Reportedly plagued by Weinsteinian bulldozers in the making — to the degree that Gilliam halted production for half a year and made the upcoming Tideland before returning — the film nevertheless has the relaxed air of a rainy afternoon spent reading Robert E. Howard.
213/365: Coffee and Cigarettes (Jim Jarmusch, 2003) (Criterion Channel, Vudu, YouTube, Amazon)
It’s a gag-gift amid Jarmusch’s more redoubtable works, this omnibus collection began inauspiciously enough: as a 6-minute, 1986 SNL short, in which Roberto Benigni and Steven Wright meet at a café table, smoke and drink coffee, and babble uncommunicatively to each other. Running with this wafer-thin idea — and two additional and similar shorts shot since, starring Cinque Lee, Joie Lee and Steve Buscemi, and Tom Waits and Iggy Pop — Jarmusch conceived eight more vignettes, all centered around cups ‘o joe and some smokes, all shot in high-contrast black-&-white. It doesn’t coalesce into a whole, but then again, it doesn’t try to — never more or less than what it appears to be, the film is a slow honky-tonk thud-beat, hanging out between jokes as a conceptual joke unto itself. (Sharing everyone’s ardor for the titular substances might elevate it to a state of deadpan rapture for you; we wouldn’t know.) Crispy conversational tidbits reoccur, silences are long and awkward. Essentially playing themselves, the motley cast occasionally breaks out of the caffeinated trance: Cate Blanchett, playing both herself and her jealous white-trash cousin meeting in a hotel lobby, whips up enough bemused psychodrama for an hour’s worth of soap opera, while Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan, in a deft tea-time contest between Hollywood careering and normalized social intercourse, expertly flesh out the best-written episode. But if there’s a moving moment to be salvaged among the stubbed butts, it’s the wounded look on Iggy’s face when Waits lackadaisically insults him during a friendly roadhouse rendezvous — somehow, this ragged visage of age-old American pop-ness still exudes a boyhood’s tender innocence.
214/365: The Double Steps (Los Pasos Dobles) (Isaki Lacuesta, 2011) (Mubi)
A bedevilling, blithe Spanish meta-film shot entirely in the dunes and cliff-villages of Mali, this movie begins with the tale of painter-author Francois Augieras (1925–71), whose disheveled wandering culminated, legend has it, in an abandoned bunker in the Sahara, where he painted his masterpiece on its walls and then sealed the entrance and hid it forever. Keeping faith with ideas of impermanence and fluidity, Lacuesta’s film follows several pilgrims and “Augieras” avatars through the desert, some contemporary while others are lost in time, but all caught up in quixotic pursuits (searching for the bunker, among others) and pursuing ephemeral truths. But for all of that it couldn’t be a more tactile movie — the visual scheme is never less than provocative — and the all-African, all-amateur cast is totally committed to the fantasies. Best of all, Lacuesta cuts together his nutty threads (including the discovery of a secretive albino tribe) without emphasis or agenda; it has the unpressured flow and good humor of slow river ride. In the end we glimpse footage of the real Augieras, but by then the film wanders off into its own set of suggested Cagean possibilities, and what you get feels closer to a fable-essay about the meaning of art than a narrative. Sweet stuff.
215/365: Bay of Angels (Jacques Demy, 1963) (Criterion Channel, Archive.org)
Entranced, romantic, utopian and utterly French, Demy has always been the most patronized and underappreciated of the major *nouvelle vague* voices, the movement’s balladeer rather than another surgeon, and so his films could be and were consumed and enjoyed like mousse and dismissed as insubstantial after the fact. This film, his second, is a relatively somber affair, not an un-musical but a demi-noir, a pensive, edge-of-the-law pas de deux between compulsive gamblers. The movie’s pilot light, Jeanne Moreau stars as Jackie, an “industrialist’s wife” who, we eventually learn, is such an irredeemable demimondaine that she lost custody of her only child. (“I’ve got the feeling I gambled him away,” she says in a chillingly matter-of-fact off-moment.) Crowned by a bleach-blonde bouffant, wearing Gabor-sister eyelashes and drawing on a ubiquitous cigarette as if it were her fuel source, Moreau is emblematic Eurotrash — and Demy’s scenario is careful to edge this perfectly conceived social type toward an existential brink. Jackie loves gambling, she says, for its “stupid mixture of poverty and luxury.” Blithely beyond loss or gain, hardly caring whether she’s rolling in winnings or begging for bus fare, Jackie is exactly the kind of extreme characterization that makes real noirs still throb — she’s the blood-sister of The Tarnished Angels’ Dorothy Malone and Gun Crazy’s thrill-fetish lovers.
Shot in breathtakingly vivid black and white by Jean Rabier, Bay of Angels views Jackie’s no-future desolation through the placid eyes of Jean (Claude Mann), a mild bank clerk whose roulette windfall sends him on a cool-headed tour of Nice casinos looking for a lifestyle overhaul. Of course, once he finds Jackie, his vague plans crystalize into a love story; even so, their symbiotic relationship slowly turns into a parasite/host showdown. Demy frames the action with enormous restraint; most of the time, you don’t see the roulette wheel during a decisive spin, only the two gamblers distractedly waiting for the croupier’s call. You’re not even aware the movie is a romance until the final tracking shot — unless the cascading Michel Legrand piano score hits you as something less than a poker face. Most of all, it’s an early chapter of Demy’s visual romance with the provincial France of his youth, with the most bewitching generation of French actresses, and with movies.
216/365: The First Time (Jonathan Kasdan, 2012) (Vudu, Hulu, Starz, Amazon)
Against all odds, Kasdan’s first film — a teen rom-com — is something of a wonder, a palm-sized tennis ball of banter and irony and earnestness that never stops moving, and in which every character is in active revolt against the stereotypical position they’re helplessly taking. Aubrey (Britt Robertson) and Dave (Dylan O’Brien) meet in a Los Angeles alley outside of a chaotic red-plastic-cup house party; she’s disgusted, he’s rehearsing a lovesick speech to a luscious vamp (Victoria Justice) who keeps him as a friend-pet. Expecting nothing but savvy understanding from each other, the two immediately click but don’t quite know it; when the party breaks up, she invites him to her nearby McMansion, and the conversation continues, full of mistakes and dares and exploratory jabs. From there, the two muddled kids return to their daily routines — his quirky diner cohort, her hilariously hypercool older boyfriend (James Frecheville) — and the dance of call-me-maybe, meet-cute-or-not-so-cute escalates. It sounds rote and hackneyed, but the undulating flow of gentle, loving, unrelenting sarcasm, and the entertaining shiver it gives the characters, squares it firmly in the tradition of old-school screwball romances, the kind at which Irene Dunne and Cary Grant used to be dab hands.
Neither Robertson and O’Brien wait for their audience to catch up with their babbling-brook readings, but the heightened sense of social intercourse also illuminates Kasdan’s agenda, which is to subvert the familiar scenario in ways even the characters don’t expect. Nothing “goes” according to any archetypal plan, including the eponymous nookie, and both of the kids are haunted by the thought of being all too similar to their dumb and/or heartless contemporaries. The film’s also proudly realist about teen romance itself — its pointlessness, its dire chances for happiness or survival. The film’s L.A. is a privileged high school fantasyland, but nothing is easy or convenient, and watching these two puppies stumble over themselves and each other on their way to their own inevitable adult disappointments can be surprisingly poignant.
217/365: Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (William Klein, 1966) (Criterion Channel, Apple TV, Amazon)
A busy ’60s shutterbug for the French Vogue, Klein more or less fell in with the Left Bank French New Wavers (Resnais, Demy, Marker, Varda), but his perspective was New Yawk pugilistic, his humor was mercilessly accusatory, and his eye was unerringly sharp and expressive. But like a missing-link hominid stepping out of the jungle, Klein was apparently also the great bullgoose Art-Film-era satirist we never knew we had. Hallowed for his still images and his documentaries, Klein also made furiously hostile lampoons that were nominally released, ignored and then forgotten. They’re still salient, since the brainless sociopathologies that Klein attacks have only grown more powerful and pervasive in the intervening decades, and precious few Western filmmakers today have the nerve to satirize the culture that feeds them. This movie, his first and best feature, lays into a world Klein knew intimately — fashion, from the designers to the magazines to the TV media covering both.
The titular heroine (played entrancingly by the rather Theron-esque Dorothy MacGowan in her only film) is a simple Brooklyn girl hitting the big time in Paris as a cover girl, accosted by slavering men on the street, chased down by a TV-expose producer (Jean Rochefort) trying to fathom what he perceives to be her beautiful emptiness, and pursued by the bumbling emissaries of a mythical prince (Sami Frey), who’s fallen in love with her photo. Chockablock with imagery and set pieces that are simultaneously gorgeous and thick with outrageous content, making vicious fun of men and sexism and media shallowness and Diana Vreeland and haute couture (the opening sequence plays out behind the scenes at a runway show where a designer has outfitted his girls entirely in giant shards of sharp-edged aluminum), Klein’s movie is virtually Voltairean in its exactitude, and Bunuelian in sardonic wit.
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, 30
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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