There have been times when
months pass without my watching anything on the Criterion Channel and I
begin to think about canceling my charter subscription, but then I’ll recall
what a resource it is, and begin to find plenty to watch. It definitely is one of the bedrock sources
for streaming availability. But I have
to say, it might better to subscribe only intermittently, when there is
something specific I want to explore, either director or performer, genre or
theme, nationality or era.
Here I intend to catch up
with brief notices of some of the old and new films I’ve watched in passing
over recent months, and also to dig a little deeper into Criterion’s offerings,
especially as some other streaming channels fall into Covid-delayed production. I’ve been keeping up this list for a while,
but will start this survey with a recent viewing that could easily have fallen
under the heading of my recent post “Delving into mental health.”
John Cassavetes is more of a
hero to younger independent filmmakers than he is to me, and I’ve never really
undertaken a survey of his work, much of which is on Criterion. I’m not even sure which of his films I’ve even
seen. In truth, I didn’t uncover any
memories of having ever seen A Woman Under the Influence (1974,
MC-88), generally taken to be his best film, earning a Best Director nomination,
while his wife and star Gena Rowlands won a Best Actress nod. It’s a peculiarly compelling piece of work,
overlong and overwrought, but you can’t look away or guess what might happen
next. Rowlands goes well beyond tics and
eccentricities to depict a young wife and mother fighting off psychic
disintegration. She’s beautiful and
charming, perceptive and honest in her own way, at times a little scared and
scary, but by no means is she the craziest person in this family, just a
sensitive soul who is the bearer of others’ dysfunction. At least that’s how I read it. Peter Falk as the husband has his loving
moments, but he’s an overbearing brute, a laboring man’s man. His mother (played by Cassavetes’ mother) is
the greatest cross that Rowlands has to bear, with scant help from her own mother
(played by her real mother). Three
children are her refuge and her delight.
I appreciate the naturalism of the film, and the violence of its
emotions, and Gena Rowlands is a wonder, but I find myself resisting the
character of the director more than that of his characters. He doesn’t seem like a guy I would want to
know (an image perhaps derived from his role in Rosemary’s Baby). I thought to take a look at a couple of his
other films, but couldn’t get past ten minutes into either.
Fishing for titles on the
channel, I paid attention to an email blurb on the most-watched movies of the
month and noticed the unknown-to-me 1999 film Clockwatchers (MC-64). Seeing that it starred Toni Collette, Parker
Posey, and Lisa Kudrow, I needed no further recommendation. With that cast, the Sprecher sisters – writer
Karen and director Jill – could hardly go far wrong, but in truth they didn’t
go far right. Four temps work in the
sterile, big-brother-ish atmosphere of a credit office, but find a fragile
little community of their own. Somewhere
in the continuum between 9 to 5 and The
Office (UK version), this film finds its modest little niche.
As if to show me what I’d be
missing without it, the Criterion Channel recently brought out a new collection
that suggested just how essential a subscription can be: Art-House
Animation. Of the 32 films in the series, I’d seen
six, liked them all, and reviewed them here previously: Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress (2001,
MC-70) and Paprika (2006, MC-81), Persepolis (2007,
MC-90), Waltz with Bashir (2008, MC-91), Chico & Rita (2010,
MC-76), and Tower (2016, MC-92).
So I made big plans to watch
and comment on the entire series, but then decided against a deep dive, though
I may revisit the list from time to time.
There are only two I’ve gotten to so far, one the most recent and the other
most recommended. I was quite enamored
of the painterly style of No. 7 Cherry Lane (2019, MC-72), the
first animated film from longtime director Yonfan. It’s a visually stunning portrait of Hong Kong in the late Sixties, when it was still a British colony, and nothing
like the international trading city it would become. But the protests against British rule
prefigure the unrest over today’s takeover by Beijing. The story is
likely autobiographical, with a nod to The Graduate, about an English
literature major who falls for a beautiful, willful girl he’s tutoring, and
then discovers his true love in her mother, who derives an inner liberation
from the films of Simone Signoret and erotic dreams of a Taoist nun. Personally I’d never seen a Yonfan film
before, and I can bet you’ve never seen an animation quite like this –
swooningly sensual, nostalgically melancholic, mesmerizingly surreal, and very
adult.
It’s Such a Beautiful
Day (2012, MC-90) couldn’t be
more different. Don Hertzfeldt’s
crudely-drawn, low-def graphics combine with stark deadpan narration to tell
the tribulations of Bill, an existentially distraught stick-figure neurotic. Some love the dark humor of it all, you may
hate it, I fall somewhere in-between.
Though I have to say, I stopped watching the collection after this – but
I’ll give some others a try at some point.
Agnès Varda is always worth a
watch and Criterion has nearly all of her work, ideal to discover or revisit. I’ve written about her films before, and may
some day put together a not-exhaustive career summary, if and when I go back
and re-watch her earlier fiction films, in the context of her great late career
as an autobiographical documentary essayist.
From her middle period, Mur
Murs (1981) was a revelation, the possibly over-clever title (Wall
Walls in French) unfolding into a bracing documentary about the mural
traditions of L.A. But there’s no
denying the cleverness of her visuals in depicting the murals in juxtaposition
both to the artists who painted them and the largely-black-and-brown community
who live with, and are celebrated within, these painted landscapes. (This film was an accomplished precursor to
her acclaimed later documentary, Faces Places – Visages Villages
in French.) Documenteur (1981)
was made at the same time in the same places, and actually features her 8-year
old son Mathieu Demy, playing the son of the main character, a divorced
Frenchwoman trying to make a go of it in the unglamorous precincts of the City
of Angels. Sensuous and
probing, in the Varda manner, this short feature film does not have the impact
of her major work.
A similar pairing occurred
later that decade with Kung-Fu Master! and Jane B. par
Agnès V. (1988), the latter a documentary profile of Jane Birkin, and
the former a feature film written by and starring Jane B. with a teen Mathieu
Demy as her love interest, and her teen daughter played by her real daughter,
Charlotte Gainsbourg. Both films are
curiosities, and dependent on the viewer’s interest in Ms. Birkin (from scandalous
nude scene in Blow-up, through storied film, fashion, and music
career, to the eponymous handbag). They
also are testaments to the friendship between the two women, and there must
have been some difficult moments for Agnès serving as de facto intimacy
counselor in love scenes between her friend and her own 14-year-old son, who is
the master game player of the title.
A great find on the CC was Vittorio De Seta’s excellent series of ten short documentaries, made in wide-screen
color in the late 1950s, set in Sicily and Calabria. They depict a
peasant lifestyle that goes back centuries, and gave me a vivid sense of my
paternal ancestry.
Another documentary find was Nikolaus
Geyrhalter’s Earth (2020, MC-72), a further
devastating case about humans as the predominant geological force of this era,
horrifically beautiful in the same vein as Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (reviewed
here),
and continuing Geyrhalter’s career project from Our Daily Bread (review here). Rather than adding ominous music or gloomy
narration, with each depiction of the eight worldwide sites of massive earth-moving,
he directly interviews the operators of the huge machines that move mountains,
for one reason or another. Most love the
grit and power of their job, but have reservations about the impact of their
work. The film offers a paradoxical mix
of wonder and horror in cautionary tableaux.
There were some Criterion
exclusives that appeared among the best films of 2020 on Metacritic’s critics poll. Personally, I was unimpressed by Bacurau (MC-82), an odd hybrid of
political thriller and sci-fi from Brazil, and could not bear to watch Vitalina Varela (MC-86), so dark and
slow, for more than a few minutes. One
CC “exclusive” that did make my 2020 list of favorites, Sorry We Missed You (reviewed here),
I’d already watched at first opportunity on Kanopy.
Then there are older TCM-type films that balance CC’s exhaustive range of Janus Films from the
golden age of cinephilia. There were quite a few that filled in minor
gaps in my vintage film viewing. I note
them in passing, just to fulfill the very earliest purpose of Cinema Salon, to
record what I’ve seen so I don’t watch it again (unless I really want to).
[Click on “Read more,” if you
want to.]
