Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 35
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
239/365: Walkabout (Nicholas Roeg, 1971) (Criterion Channel, Sling TV, Kanopy, Amazon)
Roeg’s famous career-establisher seems in synopsis to be subtext-laden adventure saga: a young British boy and his teenage sister are lost in the Outback, and survive only thanks to the friendship of a teen Aboriginal boy hunting in the desert. But it’s really about sex, from virtually the first anxious scenes back in Adelaide, where the siblings’ father watches his nubile daughter frolic in the pool, and later when they’re in the wilderness for a picnic, when every glimpse of her legs and peachy skin makes the man glower. Soon enough, he’s got the gun and gasoline out, ready for a full-on murder-suicide, and the kids escape with only a little lemonade and the boy’s toys.
The ostensible “coming of age” hippie-era odyssey that follows is vexed by sex as well — specifically, by 16-year-old Jenny Agutter’s mellow doe-ish-ness, cavorting as she does in a short-short skirt and see-through blouse, and, famously, skinny-dipping in a mountain pool. The stress of survival is nothing compared to sexual tension, as the native lad, played by David Gulpilill, butchers and roasts untold amounts of lizards, birds and kangaroos, and pines for the white girl he cannot have. It’s a dreamy, exotic, touristy film, and typically for Roeg it’s never less than gorgeous and disarmingly shot. It’s easy to see why in the latter heyday of the New Wave era it became a favorite of college students and cinephiles, but today, it’s a time piece, and a groundbreaker (this was the period when filmmakers were really discovering wildernesses and American highways and French countrysides for the first time). Certainly, it’s one of those film testaments to a moment in a beautiful woman’s life — shall we all confess to Agutter-philia — captured forever.
240/365: Fuse (Pjer Zalica, 2003) (Mubi, Amazon)
Ever since the fateful dissolution of Yugoslavia and the wars of 1990–92, Slavic filmmakers have been busy building a unique brand of ethnic movie: embraceable comic nihilism, bleeding with memories of truly horrific local warfare but still biting every rump in sight simply for the bitter fun of it. For all of the tribalism, it might just be a regional sensibility. Good old-fashioned anarchy, this Bosnian farce — the first feature by director Zalica — throws gasoline and dances in the conflagration like low-grade Kusturica. We’re plopped down into a corrupt, rancor-poisoned village on the Serbian border just two years after the civil war ends, as it is scrambling to create the illusion of law-abiding togetherness and democracy on the eve of a visit from President Clinton. Smugglers, white slavery, land mines, martyr ghosts, relentless renditions of “House of the Rising Sun,” guns everywhere: this multi-character weave off-handedly recalls Jiri Menzel’s Czech-village time capsules just as it articulates the political canyon between social appearance and the vendetta bloodthirst underneath. Throughout, Zalica’s touch is broad but sure, and his satire has plenty of fuel.
241/365: Hindle Wakes (Maurice Elvey, 1927) (Amazon, TV Time)
A forgotten, recently-exhumed British silent from journeyman Elvey (a career that last 45 years, and well over 100 films), from a hot and repeatedly filmed 1912 play by Stanley Houghton, that centers on the Lancashire mill industry and its low-salary “bond slaves,” including a few liberated girlfriends who indulge in sexual-romantic dalliances and meet up with tragic fates during the Lancashire “wakes week” holiday. Initially as righteously indignant about labor and class inequity as any Soviet film of the time, Elvey’s version eventually confronts Victorian morality directly, and could be read as both progressive and conservative, depending on how you read the story. More vitally, and typical of 1927 nearly everywhere on Earth, the filmmaking is lavishly evocative: vivid location shooting, imagistic details, Ozu-like still lifes (the massive factory unattended, etc.), a stirring, nearly two-minute pan over a surging crowd of dancing vacationers, even POV shots aboard carnival rides, a year before King Vidor’s The Crowd. The 2005 British Film Institute restoration includes a plaintive original soundtrack by In the Nursery’s Klive and Nigel Humberstone — it may be anachronistic, but its mournful arpeggios peg the film as an elegy for lost time. With the music’s help, even the overacting becomes a rueful kind of social commentary.
242/365: Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzman, 2010) (Apple TV, Amazon)
Chile’s self-appointed, one-man Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Guzman has devoted the last four decades to chronicling the short-lived Allende administration and the Pinochet dark ages that followed, long after his countrymen wanted him to stop. At first blush, though, this film detours toward astronomy, landing rather Herzogishly in the Atacama Desert, the elevation and absolute dryness of which make it one of the globe’s optimal observatory locations. Guzman uses the stars’ distance to ruminate on the nature of time — as in, everything, even light, even this, is in the past — and eventually winds his way around to how time has treated the ghost-town-turned-concentration-camp of Chacabuco and its ex-prisoners, as well as the bones of disappeared Pinochet victims dumped from airplanes onto the desert, and the tough, striking old women that still scour the arid plateau for them on foot. Guzman is fugue-weaving all over the place, montage-cutting from the lunar surface to giant close-ups of calcified bone, and the film’s philosophical musings slowly funnel down into a silent yowl of rage and a desperate plea for remembrance. (If Guzman’s right, Chileans have an even stronger urge to forget than Americans do.) Often stark and ravishing, it’s most moving as a manifestation of the filmmaker’s stubborn righteousness.
243/365: Kissing Jessica Stein (Charles Herman-Wurmfeld, 2001) (Hulu, Vudu, Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon)
A little indie rom-com from nowhere that proved a breakout hit, this unassuming New York farce outwits, out-times and out-acts every big-budget romantic comedy of its decade. The terrain is post-Woody Allen, and the titular heroine (Jennifer Westfeldt) is a neurotic Jewish New York editor-flibbertigibbet impulsively investigating lesbianism. Her personal-ad inamorata Helen (Heather Juergensen) is a bisexual gallery manager who’s nonplussed by little; together, the two traverse a relationship’s shaky beginnings, blissful middle ground and climactic coming-out state of crisis.
Skipping through star-making performances, Westfeldt and Juergensen, both of them so lovely and assured you could swear they’re movie vets, wrote the screenplay, too, and the movie hits often filthy homeruns every couple of minutes. (Oddly, the two actresses did not enjoy stardom going forward — Westfeldt has been busy in supporting roles, but Juergensen appears to have retired after 2007.) Nailing the Long Island Jewish family vibe down for all time, the film climaxes with one of modern movie’s sneakiest, most heartbreaking mother-daughter face-offs (including legendary Jewish mom Tovah Feldshuh); the single line, “She seems like a very nice girl,” has the improbable impact of an open firehose.
244/365: Stroszek (Werner Herzog, 1977) (Tubi, Apple TV, Kanopy, YouTube, Sling TV, Amazon)
Herzog’s Amerika, just one of his 70s masterpieces, and possibly the greatest film a European ever made about America. From a fart lit on fire to a compulsively dancing chicken, it is Herzog’s most bittersweet film, in which everything utterly ordinary in a Midwest way feels outrageously absurd and bruisingly sad. Typically, Herzog relies on encountered reality to do a lot of his strange-planet legwork, beginning with the central personage of Bruno S., a mentally-impaired street musician who spent a good chunk of his life in institutions, and who Herzog had cast in the lead of Kasper Hauser two years earlier. Here, in a role written for him that uses aspects of his real life (including his own accordion and bugle), Bruno is that miraculous Herzogian figure, something so disobediently authentic and unself-consciously unpredictable that we’re glued to his every discombobulated glance and gesture. He’s not acting, yet he is, pungently, in symphony with both experienced actors (especially Fassbinder vet Eva Mattes) and real Wisconsinians essentially playing themselves.
The film’s tale follows Bruno, fresh from institutional release, tailing along with Eva (as a prostitute getting battered too often by her pimps) and the diminutive Mr. Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz), as the three abandon a brutal Berlin for Scheitz’s nephew’s Plainfield spread. The story is all texture, familiar stranger-in-a-strange-land beats executed with Herzog’s distinctively freakish eye and appetite for crazed detail, from the rifle-armed tractor drivers to the magically jabbering auctioneer to that pathetic chicken, trapped in her arcade prison. By the film’s square-dance-like ending, a choreography between runaway tow truck, frozen turkey, hunting rifle and ski lift, the film attains the kind of mundane majesty Herzog mustered as effortlessly from the Amazon and the Sahara.
245/365: Will It Snow for Christmas? (Sandrine Veysset, 1996) (Mubi)
Veysset’s austere, humane, uncompromised debut is a formless, naturalistic tragedy, a visual dirge/hymn to the family; unrelenting and harsh, it’s a film whose simple and coldly observed realities bite at your knuckles like a winter wind. The winner of the Best Picture Cesar that year, it has the grit and integrity of a documentary, entailing the day-to-day life of a farm family: the beleaguered mother (Dominique Reymond) and her seven adoring children, all of them illegitimate, their father (Daniel Duval) a domineering cretin whose legit family in town enjoys all the amenities while the farm family scrapes for wood, food and electricity. Despite the setup, Veysset’s film is far from melodramatic — Duval is no cartoon brute, nor is Reymond a saint — but the film’s thrust, etched in every scene’s authentic details, is the desperate love between mother and children, and the lengths each will go to save the other from hardship.
It’s not a holiday-season film, and synopsis does it no favors — it’s all texture, shot by Helene Louvart without flourishes or inertia in a manner that the French were better at than anybody, especially when the film involves kids. The situation as Veysset as prescribed it is a self-created hell with no exits, and the steady litany of quiet ordeal can grind at you, but the final act revolves around an astonishingly brave ambiguity that makes us forgive any impatience we may’ve felt. Suffice it to say that we’re left wondering if it’s a heartbreaking disaster narrowly deterred or a horrible dream woken from. Either way, it’s euphoric.
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, 31, 32, 33, 34
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
Keep up with Smashcut 365 by following Smashcut on Medium, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.
What is Smashcut?
Smashcut is a next generation learning platform built for real time, media-based education. Smashcut partners with universities and organizations to develop and deliver customized, branded, media-based online programs. The Smashcut platform features a high degree of collaborative instruction, and real-time student project review via live 1:1 video sessions with instructors. We built Smashcut to help the next generation of students learn to communicate ideas and work effectively in a culture and workplace increasingly dependent on visual media and digital collaboration. Learn more at Smashcut.com.
