Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 5
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
29/365: Under the Sand (Francois Ozon, 2000) (Vudu, Kanopy, Amazon)
A quiet, oblique and finally mesmerizing work of psychological knifework, Ozon’s film happens almost completely on Charlotte Rampling’s face. An aging European lioness famous 35 years now for icy beauty, reptilian mystery and demimondaine high living, Rampling began by coasting on her looks, as the roommate in Georgy Girl (1966), the concentration camp survivor in The Night Porter (1974), and the bipolar girlfriend in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980). But in her mid-50s she bloomed into one of her generation’s most fascinating actresses. This movie begins unassumingly enough: middle-aged couple Marie and Jean (Rampling and Bruno Cremer) drive to their vacation house, stop for coffee, arrive, open the cottage up, chat, and hit the beach. After Marie wakes up from a nap, the clockwork begins: Jean is gone. A police search ensues (largely off-screen), and then a large block of time passes, after which we see Marie at home having dinner with friends. Only when Marie mentions Jean as if he’s merely away on a business trip — and her dinner-mates drop their casual smiles — that we understand that she has dropped off the edge of reality in reaction to her sudden widowhood. Jean himself appears nonetheless, as a friendly ghost keeping Marie company in their home, comfortingly filling up the empty space even as Marie beds a suitor. Essentially a study of psychological collapse and self-preservation, Ozon’s film is constructed as a tense tightrope walk between what we know about Marie and what we think we know. Ultimately, in the beachtown’s coroner’s office, Marie and the viewer are faced with a reality that remains open for interpretation. In that scene, Rampling keeps five narrative balls in the air; she defies us to watch her eyes and read the subtitles at the same time. As for the enigmatic final shot, the ambiguity is too clear to despoil with questions.
30/365: Coffy (Jack Hill, 1973) (Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon)
Pam Grier was the Nixon era’s ne plus ultra of sexualized black power, a glowering tower of kickass sex appeal and curvy righteousness, the queen of blaxploitation. Perhaps the coolest and most outrageous of Grier’s straight-on crime films, this pulpster is a something of a cheap shot that has, with age, acquired the seductive aesthetic glow of a cave painting. It’s primitive, yet sublime. The plots of these films are never complicated: Grier is Coffy (“sweet as a chocolate bar,” so says the theme song), a nurse who goes undercover as a prostitute to exact vengeance on the drug dealers that killed her junkie sister. The violence is crude, the street language cruder, the acting cruder still, but the film has an unironic innocence that to a modern sensibility seems almost beautiful. From the opening scene, in which Grier fakes being a strung-out addict and then shotguns a few unlucky pushers, to the film’s meridian — the unforgettable scene in which faux-hooker Pam goes toe-to-toe with her pimp’s jealous girlfriend and turns a posh dinner party into a gown-shredding donnybrook, tossing blondes over tables and breaking bottles over their heads — Hill’s film is a banquet of primal impulses, disreputable spectacle and unself-conscious cool. Everyone should see at least one blax epic — it’s not easy to understand the civil rights era without them — so this might as well be it.
31/365: The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949) (Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon)
Ayn Rand? Too much of a bestseller to ignore, and so Hollywood stepped up and adapted her elitist, demagogic tome, and it’s more than just a respectful filmization of a popular book that still speaks to readers who see themselves as victims of society’s monobrow — it is itself an act of ubermensch modernism. Restless director Vidor tells the tale about a Frank Lloyd Wright-esque architect (Gary Cooper) battling the world for the right to his own integrity, and raps out, in thick paragraphs of dialogue, Rand’s caught-somewhere-between-capitalism-and-socialism “objectivist” doctrine. But he’s also managed to make the only true Futurist film in American cinema, with a distinctive cement-and-bleached-beam veneer and a maniacally didactic narrative style. Little effort is made to persuade us that these are real characters, not just walking, ranting points of view, and in fact the film seems to have been made in an alternate universe, where architecture is the country’s most imperative public concern, architects are thought literally heretical if they experiment, and hordes of citizens riot if a newspaper supports (on its front page) an untraditional building. As with all utopia-building, and with most anything Rand stamped her sensibility on, the film is sweeping, hopeful nonsense; the final image of Cooper’s Howard Roarke standing atop the world’s tallest structure, hands on hips, is a poster for a revolution that never happened. Predictably, mass audiences in the postwar ’40s didn’t know what to make of this humdinger, but its rep has ballooned over the decades, and its self-superior glow is kinda beautiful.
32/365: Illustrious Corpses (Francesco Rosi, 1976) (Yidio, YouTube)
During his peak years Rosi was one of Europe’s premier explorers of criminal-political rot and social anxiety, and this key film is a rich and resonant expression of Years of Lead tension, and one of the best political thrillers of the post-Z era. It begins in the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo — a sanctified shrine of desiccated flesh and bone — where a judge (a dialogue-free Charles Vanel) is assassinated. More judges get shot in public, and weary straight-arrow detective Lino Ventura is assigned the case, initially suspecting the Mafia, and then eventually falling down a rabbit hole of official conspiracies and government plotting, all set against a broiling background of strikes, student protests and violent state repression. A la Salvatore Guiliano, a major suspect is never seen (he’s even cut out of photographs); virtually everyone else the hero confronts, at every level of the state, is a master of lies. Rosi works his spatial magic here, limning a contemporary Italy made of haunted ancient spaces so massive and shadowy we feel, as Ventura’s vexed shamus does, that secrets, historical and brand new, are everywhere and nowhere is safe. (The feedback loop between Rosi and his stepsons Coppola and Bertolucci is plain to the eye.) Paranoia is built into Rosi’s framing and Pasqualino de Santis’s cinematography, and the more the narrative uncovers, the more it’s clear that the real story is hidden, with ideology is left aside in favor of raw power. “The truth is not always revolutionary,” a riposte to Gramsci’s Communist fervor, is the film’s ultimately cynical position, in a culture otherwise consumed by left-right extremes.
33/365: Bardelys the Magnificent (King Vidor, 1926) (Kanopy, Amazon)
Released just over a month after Rudolph Valentino died, this film helped establish John Gilbert as America’s reigning romantic lead, and it is all star-power, all the time — Vidor, coming off the success of The Big Parade the year before, appears to have relaxed and let the star and the Rafael Sabatini pulp steal the day. But auteurism was the hidden code later found beneath old Hollywood’s humanist faith in distinctive personality and charisma, and Gilbert was genuine eye candy, with his great, friendly, unblinking orbs and his knife-like smile of shockingly white teeth and his comic habit of looking at other actors as if he were watching a falling tree slowly land on a limousine. The film is hoke and then some, but light as chiffon; just watch Gilbert, as the titular mega-cad, romantically swoon with one of many girl-toys and then look up, still kissing, as her husband storms in demanding restitution, and then indulges him with a swordfight during which he manages to get the couple to reconcile. From there, the lovable rogue does indeed fall in love, with a chaste maiden (Eleanor Boardman, Vidor’s new wife) via a preposterous bet that requires him to eventually swap identities with a dead man — who turns out to be an anti-royalist rebel. Vidor did define his directorial profile, and the lyricism he’d bring to The Crowd two years later, with a transcendent courtship scene in a free-floating rowboat veiled with willow branches, and the climax is a serious of building-scaling stunts that Douglas Fairbanks couldn’t have even performed (Gilbert didn’t either). But the heart of the film is simple, old-school matinee fun, executed with a skip and a back-slap, with poor Gilbert demonstrating one of the decade’s most bewitching demeanors, his fame peaking and due to crash into smithereens inside of two years with the coming of sound.
34/365: Society (Brian Yuzna, 1989) (Tubi, Shudder, Vimeo, Amazon)
Out of the morassic age of huge teen mullets and John Hughes High School psychodramas and squishily analog genre F/X, rentable-VHS shelves in the US were cluttered with this unnerving, unheralded freak, veritably the Bosch chef-d’oeuvre of ’80s home-video theater. The film’s Marxist subtext never quite “sub” — amidst the snitty air of teenage tempter tantrums and movie-movie Beverly Hills hyper-privilege lurks a critique of class predation that would’ve suited Bunuel and which, in the film’s climax, explodes into a taboo-busting Surrealism that edged the movie toward a kind of mating between William S. Burroughs and Thorstein Veblen. As cheaply made and ramshackle as it is, it’s a vision of societal cannibalism couched in the familiar and angsty perspective of children not quite understanding what their own parents are doing, loudly, behind closed doors. This universal anxiety — acted out with every ’80s cliche in the book — doesn’t eventually lead to a symbolic creature or force, but to the workings of society itself. Saddled with an intolerable mullet, the black-haired L.A. high school hero (Billy Warlock) becomes more than a little suspicious of his blond parents and sister as they prepare for her debutante debut, and the movie’s only half done with us when it becomes disturbingly clear that there is some kind of institutionalized incest afoot, shared by the snotty upper-crust teens and leering grown-ups around them and kept secret from the lower classes. The crux of the matter isn’t sex at all, but something far worse, a rousingly imagined (and plasticized, by prosthetics master Screaming Mad George) metaphor-in-action fleshy orgy-feast, the likes of which are as hard to describe as they are vividly evocative of every kind of aristocratic co-optation and consumption. In short, the brisk generalization of Yuzna’s title is nothing if not apt. The mutability of the body is symbolic itself of how many ways the underclasses can be absorbed and drained by the wealthy, but the visual details can leave a mark, particularly the fat rich men in their underwear slavering over warping young flesh and then absorbing it into theirs like amoebae. It might be fruitless to search for a modest B-movie quite as outrageously rich with both Freudian qualm and political disgust.
35/365: Shadow (Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 1956) (EasternEuropeanMovies.com)
A contemporary of Andrzej Wajda who’s little acknowledged outside of Poland, Kawalerowicz helped break the Polish New Wave in the mid-‘50s, but even within his underexamined filmography this odd movie remains a mysterious and rarely discussed work, a lurking examination of collaborationism and resistance as it’s expressed in an investigation into the identity of a dead man. The narrative encompasses three sequential stories of betrayal, two during WWII and one in the postwar present, all told by the men who were betrayed, and yet all three connected by the shadowy thread of a single duplicitous figure, a goldbricking nobody who just so happens to have controlled the secret narrative behind the stories we see. It’s a complex feat of screenwriting, for sure, and Kawalerowicz’s catapulting, pitch-dark visualizations don’t go out of their way to makes us feel safe and omniscient. (The movie’s restless docket of baroque post-noir images predates Wajda’s Kanal and Ashes & Diamonds, and were clearly part of the Zeitgeist.) You may have to watch it twice before the tendons of the plot fully reveal themselves.
Year Four Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4
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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