Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 8
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
50/365: Simon of the Desert (Luis Bunuel, 1965) (Criterion Channel, Amazon)
Frankly delighted with human folly, and as fluent as a Symbolist poet with the effortlessly iconic image, Bunuel may have been the greatest filmmaker of the first century. Certainly, among the ten or twelve unassailable masters of the medium, he is the wittiest, the least sentimental, the most philosophically imaginative, and among the very few cinema giants you couldn’t in your wildest dreams accuse of pretension. (Renoir, Ozu and Bresson are the other three.) This oddity is lovely, hilarious, prime Bunuel, on the last legs of his underrated and underexamined Mexico period, before he finally moved to France and became world famous all over again. The parable-like set-up, for a Spanish filmmaker in Mexico, waist-deep his whole life in medieval Catholicism, is choice: in a mythical Mexican outland, a self-styled ascetic “saint” (Bunuel staple and Mexican institution Claudio Brook) lives atop an enormous pillar in order to demonstrate his selflessness and devotion to God. (The pillar, an “advance” on a more modest one, is provided by an unseen “benefactor” — sanctification is a business, too.) Unfortunately for Simon the local peasants and clergy won’t leave him be; recognizing his holiness, they demand sacraments, and with each confrontation Simon’s piety becomes a little more testy. The crowning moment of duplicity is when Simon actually performs a miracle, restoring a thief’s severed hands — the newly blessed man and his family instantly, greedily turn on their heels and go home without a glimpse of gratitude or awe, having gotten what they wanted. Eventually, of course, the Devil shows up, in the form of luscious Silvia Pinal, to tempt Simon, landing him eventually in a contemporary nightclub, where his brand of monastic dedication has no meaning whatsoever. It’s famously an unfinished film, clocking in at 45 minutes, the victim of an empty-pocketed producer. But however mitigated by circumstance, as a launch out of Bunuel’s humane-but-acid-soaked brainpan it is life-invigorating, gorgeous (the last Bunuel piece photographed by Gabriel Figueroa), and invaluable. For us initiates, undiluted Bunuel morsels are worth their weight in caviar.
51/365: Paradise: Faith (Ulrich Seidl, 2012) (Vudu, Amazon)
This second film in Seidl’s acid Paradise trilogy, coming after Love’s bruising tropical-tourism anti-daydream, doesn’t spare the rod. First thing we see is a plump middle-aged hausfrau kneel before a crucifix in a closed room, beseech Christ for forgiveness, strip to the waist, and then furiously flog herself with a metal-tipped cat-o’-nine-tails. This is Anna Maria (veteran character actress Maria Hofstatter), a mammography technician by day and the fussy neighbor we saw cat-sitting for Love’s vacationing protagonist. But mostly Anna Maria is a catastrophic, cilice-wearing uber-Catholic, pinched and paranoid and living tidily alone. All three Paradise films focus on their heroines when on vacation, and Anna Maria’s holiday is comprised mostly of hefting a lawn madonna into Vienna’s scrubbier tenements and evangelizing, door to door. Her series of experiences insisting on piety and prayer in other people’s apartments has its own damnation arc, from just funny-crazy to over-her-head violent. But the woman’s tribulation is really at home — with no warning a paraplegic Arab man (Nabil Saleh) appears on her couch, and though they obviously have a past, Seidl waits until the movie’s almost half over before letting the story backfill. With just one gesture we realize they’re an estranged husband and wife, and Anna Maria’s whole-hog Christ obsession is her remade self, an attempt to erase the past. As usual, Seidl goes where we hope he won’t, and his signature camera style — full-frontal distance with three walls showing, watching the ordeal ’til it hurts — has a particular icon-tableau resonance under the circumstances. Anna Maria begins as a regressive caricature, but through the physical humiliations and flagellation and battles with her emasculated husband’s awakening Islamic ire, she emerges in four full dimensions, a woman at odds with the world and in delusional love with an illusion.
52/365: The Chase (Arthur Ripley, 1946) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon)
Because it sprawls and lurks and stands as a mushrooming film-culture infestation rather than as a mere genre, no matter how definite you take its calendrical limits to be (for me, it’s 1944–1964), film noir may never be fully indexed. Noiristes are never in possession of the whole thing — there are always more films, more dark corners and empty night alleys, to discover. This early, freaky, little-known slice of darkness is symptomatic — a noir very few scholars and fans knew was there. Based on a Cornell Woolrich story, it’s a grimy programmer that slips the strait-jacket of “reality” with all the late-night delirium of a head-trauma war veteran. Robert Cummings is the schmuck, a broke ex-soldier wandering in Miami and falling in with Steve Cochran’s seminally affectless sadist-gangster, his extremely unlikely henchman (Peter Lorre), and his hot wife (Michele Morgan). Of course he ends up helping the abused wife escape to Havana, where she’s mysteriously stabbed to death, before he wakes up back in Miami, where… what? “It’s happened again,” he mutters amidst the Bunuelian/Lynchian weirdness, eventually returning to the same Cuban nightclub, where another story seems to be taking place. With its very dark palate and the ceaseless creep of unstable subjectivity, the movie exudes the feeling that anything at all could happen, and for the day it’s outright unnerving.
53/365: Hilary and Jackie (Anand Tucker, 1998) (YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon)
In concept a more or less typical tragic biopic, this restless film takes on the story of cellist Jacqueline du Pre — at first you’re convinced the movie will glibly extol the passionate bond of siblings; by the end, it has played out the ambivalent ballad of sisterhood like few movies have managed. The du Pre sisters were both ‘50s musical prodigies; though Hilary was first to be lauded for the flute, she was soon passed by Jackie, whose operatic affair with the cello made her, by her teen years, an international phenomenon. Intimate but cruelly competitive since they were kids, married country mouse Hilary (Rachel Griffiths) and lonely celebrity Jackie (Emily Watson) spend their lives envying each other, until the balance shifts in Hilary’s favor when Jackie begins to slip gears, sabotages her relationships, turns up at her sister’s manse in an unstable whorl and seduces her husband (David Morrissey). That Jackie ends up being plagued with MS isn’t the cliche it might be, not as it’s seen here, fogging over her perceptions as her hands and cello seem to furiously play an Elgar concerto without her. Screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce divided the narrative up into two Rashomon halves, and though Griffiths shines in the quieter role, Watson shakes the rafters. Her Jackie isn’t just a disjointed talent, she’s thorny, girlish, anarchic, and prone to self-destructively leaving her priceless cello behind at airports. Watson is a mercurial presence with huge, nervous baby eyes, and when she cuts loose, an otherwise conventional film shudders with anxiety. Still, the movie’s money moment belongs to the two of them, huddled in bed together during the late stages of Jackie’s affliction, and it’s worth waiting for.
54/365: Poil de Carotte (Julien Duvivier, 1926) (Criterion Channel, YouTube)
A French-film-history antique long forgotten amid the lengthy Duvivier oeuvre, where Pepe le Moko (1935), Flesh and Fantasy (1943), Panique (1947), and a strange wealth of metaphysically-plotted silents take most of the lingering limelight, this silent is actually a modern-peasant tragedy in the tradition that eventually produced Bresson’s Mouchette and the Dardennes’ Rosetta, semi-masquerading as a provincial farce. The set-up pits the entire tiny world of an Alpine farming community against the preteen hero (Andre Heuze), with the sole exception of a sympathetic maid. Everyone else, including his brother, his father, his teacher and what few neighbors we see, are hostile, small-minded and toxic, while his mother, in a mustachioed performance by Charlotte Barbier-Krauss, is a petty, conniving beast and one of the most mercilessly cruel mother figures in cinema history. (“Not everyone can be an orphan,” the kid bemoans at one point.) The acting is essentially comic, but by the midway point you pray for a James M. Cain-like plot that would scheme at taking the woman down and leaving her under an inch of loose soil. There is a thrumming current of psychological realism here that’s years ahead of its time: the hero doesn’t merely despair of his plight, but begins to be poisoned by it developmentally, and is eventually haunted by suicidal impulse. Duvivier ups the ante and dives into a post-Last Laugh toybox of expressionistic effects, including poetic multiple exposures and, fascinatingly, a one-shot way of filming multiple perspectives in a tense room by shooting into a hinged mirror, which changes our angle of sight by swinging into and out of the frame.
55/365: Eternity and a Day (Theo Angelopoulos, 1998) (Vimeo)
A Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, this late film by the Greek art-film master is something like his answer to Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and Fellini’s 8 ½, a dreamy, subjective voyage through the memory-toggled consciousness of an aging artist alone in a crowded world. Bruno Ganz is Alexandre, a famed Greek poet who has just learned he is terminally ill, and thus decides to empty his life out, closing up his beach house, saying goodbye to his daughter, finding a home for his dog, and semi-consciously rummaging through his memories of his childhood and of his late wife. Along the way, he encounters an Albanian orphan boy (Achilleas Skevis) who is first rounded up off the street to be sold to adoptive Westerners, and who then escapes. Alexandre can’t just bring the child home with him, and so the two traverse the troubled landscape, looking for separate answers. It’s a more familiar structure than Angelopoulos usually uses, but he’s less interested in circumstance or character than in giving us massive moments, often in one shot, so spellbinding and vivid they make you rethink what movies can do. Here, as in all of his films, you’re never in doubt that the film’s melancholic crisis is Europe’s, not merely the hero’s. And the money sequences are amazing: Alexandre watching the immigrant orphans escaping from a police raid right in the middle of a busy street, the breathless sequence in an abandoned building as Alexandre follows the hoods hoping to sell the children to kid-hungry Americans, the vision at the Greek-Albanian border, as dozens of refugees cling to a huge barbed-wire fence in the blinding snow. Perhaps no other filmmaker used the passage of real time in movies so expressively.
56/365: Trans-Europ-Express (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1966) (Kanopy, YouTube, Amazon)
A famed postwar “noveau roman” writer-celebrity, and screenwriter of Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad, Robbe-Grillet was also a late-coming adjunct to the French New Wave himself, doubling down on his avant-garde literary fame and making a series of psychosexually nutty meta-movies that eat their own tails so lustily you could say they take the metatext liberations of Godard to a Duck Amuck extreme, all the while indulging in his ardor for everything softcore and kinky. It’s no small matter that Robbe-Grillet was famously on record as a devoted aficionado of all things sadistic, masochistic, and pedophilic; his wife Catherine, who appears in several of his films, remains France’s best-known dominatrix, and was publishing S/M erotica in the ’50s. (Together they had one of their nation’s most notorious pas de deux, complete with sex slaves, partner swapping, dungeons, and homicidal fantasies.) This film, his second, is a transparent Brechtian goof. As they ride the train to Antwerp (Catherine is the script girl), Robbe-Grillet and his production team try to figure out a thriller plot, involving Trintignant as a fetishistic smuggler betrayed by Marie-France Pisier — at least at first. The filmmakers keep changing the storyline, as they literally cross paths with the actors/characters, until any semblance of classical thriller plotting is lost in the fog of faux-espionage. Trintignant’s lizardy Buster Keaton gaze comes close to outright comedy. Like Resnais’s films, Robbe-Grillet’s post-modernist concoctions are primarily concerned with the hunger for narrative and the quantum impossibility of ever nailing down “what happened” with certainty — plus, a little bondage fantasy.
Year Four Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
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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