C.C. Rider

While toggling other channels on and off, I’m going to ride my Criterion Channel charter subscription into the sunset of my streaming days.  It’s one place I can always find something worth watching.  Here’s my latest see-see diary of the channel’s offerings.  (See also.)
 
Criterion’s streaming premieres are always high quality, and few could be better than The Blue Caftan (MC-83), a Moroccan feature by Maryam Touzani that is as beautiful and sensual as the title garment.  The film is a chamber piece starring three handsome and accomplished actors, a husband and wife who run a small tailoring shop making traditional dresses with exquisite handiwork, and the apprentice they take on.  The husband is a master craftsman and the wife runs the shop commandingly, but she is ill so they need the help.  The developing triangle seems obvious at first, but its quiet progress is full of surprises, though the ending comes across as foreordained.  Intimate and immersive, full of the sights and sounds of an unfamiliar culture, honest and deep about personal relations, unfolding with the splendor of the fabrics so lovingly portrayed, this film is a treasurable raiment.
 
Another outstanding new film is Afire (MC-82), a Golden Bear winner from the great German director Christian Petzold.  Out of partiality, I am perhaps too quick to identify a film I like as Rohmer-esque, so I was happy to see an interview in which Petzold made explicit this film’s dependence on Rohmer (and Chekhov).  Four young-ish singles meet adventitiously at a vacation home on the Baltic seaside: a dickish writer, an ingratiating photographer, a mysterious smiling beauty (Petzold regular Paula Beer), and a hunky lifeguard (excuse me – “rescue swimmer”).  Who will sleep with whom?  Who’s the killjoy?  What’s going on beneath the surface?  What’s happening as a nearby wildfire encroaches?  All these questions float in the air like ash, as the story veers from comedy into melodrama into ???  Not an ideal beach vacation, but a trip well worth taking.
 
The Eight Mountains (MC-78) is based on a popular Italian novel of the same name, and directed by the Belgian couple Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch.  Two boys meet during a summer in the Italian Alps, one a city boy from Turin and the other the only child left in a nearly-abandoned mountain village.  After bonding in the magnificent landscape, they meet only once as teenagers, but then fifteen years later, after the death of the city boy’s estranged father, he returns from Nepal to rebuild a remote ruined stone hut left by the father, who in effect had adopted the other boy.  The young men re-bond in the process of construction, despite their differences.  The mountain scenery is spectacular, though widescreen is avoided to focus on the personal (compare to another notable Criterion film, Godland), and the story takes abrupt transitions in stride.  Slow and lengthy, the film requires patience but offers rewards.
 
Joyland (MC-82) is an intense and intimate family drama set in Lahore.  This debut feature by Saim Sadiq focuses on the gentle sad-eyed younger brother, who is a disappointment to the rigid family patriarch, for not having a job while his wife works and for failing to provide a male heir, while his older brother has four daughters, all living in the same house.  The younger brother finally gets a job, but can’t reveal that it’s as back-up dancer to a trans female performer, with whom he develops a deepening relationship.  A well-acted film with many humorous elements, it’s a scathing look at patriarchy and misogyny, tragically suppressing both the wife and the trans lover.  Immersed in an extended Pakistani family, with an ironic title referencing an amusement park adjacent to the action, this film is continuously surprising and revelatory.
 
Rare is the month when one of Criterion’s new or featured collections does not offer novel viewing pleasure, sometimes quite unexpected.  For example, a Linda Darnell collection did not set my heart to racing, but I took a look at Forever Amber (1947), a film from the year of my birth that I’d heard of only because the source bestseller was infamously condemned by the Legion of Decency.  The English Civil War and the Restoration of Charles II (George Sanders) is an era not commonly depicted in film, so that’s a point of interest.  In the same way as Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face, Darnell brazenly uses her sexual allure to rise in status and wealth, but after the implementation of the Production Code, Otto Preminger was required to elide the exact nature of her appeal, as she rises to be the king’s consort.  But otherwise, Preminger brings a lot of his trademark realism to the proceedings.
 
That was enough to lead me to another pulpy Darnell/Preminger film Fallen Angel (1945), where she is a sultry waitress and Dana Andrews is a drifting huckster who falls hard for her.  I followed up with her breakthrough film Star Dust (1940), when as a 17-year-old she portrays a character much like herself, an ingenue from Texas who longs for Hollywood and attracts a talent agent, who then shies away when he finds out how young she actually is.  Apparently, Darnell in a career slump at the age of 41, was watching this film on late-night tv when she fell asleep and died in a fire.
 
Another oldie collection that caught my eye was “Pre-Code Divas.”  I’d seen all the Stanwycks (reviewed here) but was happy to sample several other naughty early talkies.  Since they’ll all be disappearing at the end of this month, and are of more historical than aesthetic interest, I offer only brief comments.  No Man of Her Own (1932) is the only pairing of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, years before they became a Hollywood power couple.  He’s a shifty card sharp and she’s a small-town librarian itching for excitement, and inevitably sparks fly.  Three on a Match (1932) follows three women from grade school to adulthood, when one of them goes over to the dark side, abandoning her marriage and young son for drink and sex, while the other two try to rescue her.  Joan Blondell stars, with Ann Dvorak as the bad one, and Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart in early roles.  For Safe in Hell (1931), Dorothy Mackaill plays a New Orleans prostitute who flees a murder rap by escaping to Tortuga, from which there is no extradition, but plenty of danger from predatory men.  Each of these films is interesting as a time capsule, with the kind of seedy glamour that (leaving aside Noir-ish femmes fatales) wouldn’t be seen again till the Seventies, when bad girls came back into fashion, though in the Thirties they were reliably punished in the end.
 
Among more recent revivals, I was happy to catch up with Entre Nous (1983), a film by Diane Kurys starring Isabelle Huppert and Miou-Miou.  I had no recollection of seeing it back in the day, but was quite impressed with this story based on the lives of her parents.  Huppert is an interned Jewish woman in 1942, saved by a French guard who falls for her.  Ten years later, she meets another mother at her daughter’s school, and they develop an intense relationship, part business and part romantic, which overshadows their marriages.  Edifying and engrossing.
 
I had pleasant memories of Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), which were confirmed on re-viewing.  Kathleen Turner is excellent as the title character, who faints on stage when named the queen of her 25^th reunion and wakes up as a high school senior, where she’s going with her unsatisfactory husband-to-be, Nicholas Cage in an overly-mannered but effectively-annoying performance.  The whole remains funny and touching, with several stars-to-be in subsidiary roles.
 
Documentaries are another strength of Criterion.  Day After Trinity (1981) made excellent background viewing for Oppenheimer and The Reagan Show (2017, MC-66), composed entirely of archival footage from the first presidency predominantly staged for tv, is highly but subtly revealing about how American politics got from there to here.
 
Some of these Criterion films disappear with their collection after a period of months – though many return to the channel in another curated collection – so I can’t vouch that you will find all the films commented on at all times.  My next deep dive will be into a new Ozu collection, many I’ve seen multiple times, but some I’m never seen anywhere else.  That’s Criterion for you, the gold standard when it comes to streaming channels.
 
The free library service Kanopy is another channel where you can discover old or new films unavailable elsewhere (with some overlap with Criterion).  Following a couple of retrospective threads, I was happy to find two films I wanted to see again.
 
I forget the impulse that led me to look for Rob Roy (1995), but I was glad to revisit it.  I remembered it as better than Braveheart and it remains so, with Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange generating some old-fashioned Highland heat.
 
Upon reviewing, Oscar-winner Cinema Paradiso (1988, MC-80) wasn’t heavenly, but more purgatorial than infernal.  Smarmy and manipulative at times, forced or flat-footed, derivative or self-important, it still has its charms for anyone susceptible to the magic of movies, with a clever and profound ending that redeems the sappiness of the whole.  This time around, I was avidly aware of specifically Sicilian local color.

And on Kanopy, I found a more recent film I’d been searching to stream for a while now – My Donkey, My Lover, and I (MC-72), a charming trifle about a comically infatuated woman (Laure Calamy from Call My Agent!) in pursuit of her married lover, on a donkey trek through the Cévennes following the path of R.L. Stevenson.  This mixture of rom-com and travelogue is attractive if lightweight, with the donkey emerging as wise confidante to the desperate woman.  It won’t change your life, but will make two hours pass pleasantly.

One more golden oldie had been on my watchlist for years, for forgotten reasons, so when I stumbled upon Tomorrow is Forever (1946, AMZ), I was happy to see this sub-Sirkian melodrama starring Claudette Colbert and Orson Welles, where the latter enlists in WWI and leaves his new bride behind.  In the war he is crippled and defaced, and unwillingly healed by a humane German doctor.  Meanwhile Colbert has his son and remarries her boss at the munition plant.  Twenty years later, Welles returns with a new identity, as a noted Austrian chemist at the plant, and with a 7-year-old girl in tow, daughter of the good doctor who has been murdered by the Nazis.  It’s Natalie Wood in her first credited (and creditable) role!  Ah, that’s why it was on my list, from when I was on a Natalie kick.  Glad to see it, and to immerse in its period flavor.