Counting on Criterion

With a bargain annual subscription, I don’t feel the need to pause the Criterion Channel during months when I’m not that deep into watching their offerings, because I’ll always have plenty to catch up on when I turn my attention that way.  After a season when political, baseball, and basketball races consumed so much of my viewing time, I returned to some serious cinematic exploration.
 
We’ll start with some of Criterion’s recent “Exclusive Premieres,” and then survey the monthly collections that I have recently dipped into.
 
After his Oscar-winning Drive My Car, I put Ryusuki Hamaguchi on my list of must-watch directors.  First, I tracked down his earlier films Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Happy Hour.  And now Criterion offers his latest award-winner Evil Does Not Exist (MC-83).  To tell the truth, I had some problems with the beginning and the ending, but in-between I was as usual entranced by his work.  A long tracking shot upwards through a forest canopy makes for a very extended credit sequence, and what follows are protracted scenes of a solitary rural workman sawing wood and then collecting water from a stream, which seem designed to school the viewer in patience and attentiveness, but do pay off handsomely later in the film.  It makes sense that this film started out as a short to accompany a musical score by Eiko Ishibashi, then developed into a feature.  When dialogue actually starts, it bursts out like an action movie, as locals debate the prospect of a new glamping project that will impact the very nature of their community.  With his usual evenhandedness, Hamaguchi turns villains into sympathetic characters, with seeming heroes resorting to highly-questionable behavior.  Watching this, be prepared to wait for the light but expect darkness to descend.
 
On the other hand, Catherine Breillat is not a director who attracts my interest, but I was willing to give Last Summer (MC-75) a try, and I didn’t regret it, mainly for the lead performance of Léa Drucker.  She plays a lawyer who deals in sex abuse cases, but finds herself in an explicitly-illegal affair with her 17-year-old stepson.  This “Summer” is hot but more dry than wet.  We may wonder “what does she think she’s doing?” but the actress somehow retains our sympathy despite the filmmaker’s rather unpleasant intentions.  Is that ambivalent enough for you?
 
Here (MC-92) follows an ambling man at an ambling pace, but this Bas Devos film certainly arrives at its chosen destination.  It’s slow, but short and sweet – at first I didn’t get it, but eventually I loved it.  He’s a Romanian workman on construction sites in Brussels, about to go home for a vacation, uncertain whether he will return, clearing out his refrigerator to make soup for a round of friends.  She’s a Chinese academic working on a doctoral thesis about mosses.  They’re both very reticent, but the connection is elemental, in the fugitive greenery of a concrete jungle.  The visual and sound design are precise and evocative, the performers attractive and engaging, the film a delicate but delicious concoction.
 
Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (MC-80) derives from a Henry James novella, but in a mélange of genres that don’t generally appeal to me, from sci-fi to stalker film, and the trailer suggests an outright horror film.  Nonetheless, Léa Seydoux holds it all together and makes the extended runtime tolerable, as she and her counterpart George MacKay meet and hesitantly woo in three different timeframes: 1910 Paris, 2014 California, and a 2044 dominated by AI.  Surprised to see the film come in at #5 for 2024 in Film Comment’s critics poll, I was not immune to its appeal and its inventive visual sense, but I’m not tempted to a second viewing to make more sense of it.  It was enough to spend 2½ hours in the seductive company of Ms. Seydoux.
 
It's been almost a decade since I set foot in a movie theater, but if there’s one film I would have preferred to see on a big screen, it’d be Songs of Earth (MC-85).  I’d take my typical front-&-center seat and just immerse myself in its sights and sounds.  Margreth Olin invites us to spend a year in the company of her elderly parents amidst the remote farming village where her family has lived for hundreds of years, set among the glacial glories of a Norwegian fjord.  And she rewards us with a sublime evocation of a transcendental landscape, literally following the footsteps of her 84-year-old father to wondrous sights, macro and micro, animal and mineral, especially with exquisite drone footage, through a cycle of seasons beautifully orchestrated by natural and musical sounds.  The father’s wisdom and the parents’ enduring relationship, embedded in a long history of place and people, rounds off this superlative film.  It’s a delightful cinematic treat for any viewer in a contemplative state of mind, an armchair journey to the ruggedly beautiful top of the world.  This is the sort of offering that makes the Criterion Channel indispensable.
 
Chicken for Linda! (MC-84) is a French animated film about a mother and child trying to recall the dead husband and father by making his favorite dish, chicken with peppers.  This being France, they are thwarted by a general strike that means no chicken is available, which leads to a caper and a police chase, among other raucous goings-on.  The slight premise is enlivened by simple hand-drawn animation in a busy Fauvist color scheme, along with musical numbers.  The look is highly distinctive, the story somewhat scattered, but nonetheless funny and touching.
 
Though Iran has largely suppressed its internationally-acclaimed filmmakers, a new voice emerges with Terrestrial Verses (MC-83) by a directorial pair who compiled this clever satirical amalgam of nine minimalist vignettes that illuminate the constraints imposed by the fundamentalist regime.  The effect is both maddening and hilarious, as some unseen functionary confronts a hapless petitioner with a roundabout rationale for why their request cannot be granted, whether it be naming a child or obtaining a driver’s license or getting a job or retrieving a dog.  We are put in the position of the unseen, unsympathetic official staring balefully at a citizen trying to understand the ever-shifting rules of the game.  Nobody gets beaten with a truncheon, but everybody gets beaten down, in an outrageous manner that is often laugh-out-loud funny.
 
The only streaming channel that comes anywhere close to having as many exclusive premieres of off-beat excellence as Criterion is MUBI, but the latter is worth only the occasional month’s subscription, while Criterion has enough depth and variety with its back catalogue and monthly collections to warrant an ongoing annual subscription.  Watch for a month’s worth of MUBI coming up.
 
Having fallen for Fallen Leaves, I’ve been on the lookout for earlier films by Aki Kaurismäki, and Criterion offered The Other Side of Hope (MC-84).  By now I’m familiar with his minimalist deadpan style, and receptive to the heart and humor that underlies it, which leads to “humane” as the epithet most commonly applied to the director.  This film tracks a Syrian refugee who arrives in Helsinki as a stowaway, and also follows a haberdashery salesman, who leaves his job and his wife to take over a sketchy restaurant.  The two stories eventually interweave, with interludes of Finnish street musicians between scenes.  Stylized the film may be, but it’s also an honest exploration of issues of immigration and reaction.
 
Turning to recent month-by-month collections on Criterion, I gravitated to “Lionel Rogosin’s Dangerous Docufictions,” but I think you’d need to have my lifelong interest in documentaries and predilection for neorealism to join me in seeking out the 1956 classic On the Bowery (Wiki).  In the tradition of Robert Flaherty, Rogosin does stage scenes with non-actors, but the film is a fascinating time capsule of NYC, redolent of the boozy breath of the Bowery’s denizens, in a portrayal of the desperate sorrows and fleeting joys of an outcast life.  Black Roots (Wiki) is an intriguing time capsule from 1970, a perspective on Black culture at the time, with street portraiture of Black faces, intercut with conversations among a group of Black activists and musicians.  That was so resonant an example of politically-engaged, no-budget filmmaking that I glanced at several more Rogosin films, but did not stick with any of them.
 
“Hitchcock for the Holidays” collected 19 of the maestro’s films, a great chance to take in a number of classics.  The one I was most eager to see again was Shadow of a Doubt (Wiki), highlighted by the performances of Theresa Wright and Joseph Cotton as “Charlie” and “Uncle Charlie,” the small-town niece gradually turning from adoration to suspicion of her worldly namesake.  With a minimum of violence, this humorous suspense film holds up with Hitchcock’s best, whom I’ve always admired as an artisan and entertainer, but rarely felt an affinity for as an artist.  Not sure how long this collection will linger on Criterion, but it’s a great opportunity to sample all the phases of Hitchcock’s career.

 
Similarly, in the “Pre-Code Columbia” collection, the one I wanted to see again was the standout 1932 film Forbidden (Wiki), directed by Frank Capra and starring Barbara Stanwyck.  Perhaps I was not quite as enamored of this as when in the throes of putting together my career summary of Stanwyck, but it’s still worth recommending.  She’s excellent as usual, and Adolphe Menjou very good as the ambitious politician with whom she has a lifelong secret relationship, but Ralph Bellamy is an irritant as the newspaper editor who makes trouble for them.
 
In an Ida Lupino collection I caught up with The Hard Way (Wiki) in which she plays a hard woman who rises from hardscrabble roots by ruthlessly stage managing the career of her talented younger sister (Joan Leslie), and lifts this film above the usual run of show biz backstories (this one supposedly based on Ginger Rogers’ bio).  Lupino referred to herself the “the poor man’s Bette Davis,” and Davis reportedly regretted passing up this role after she saw Lupino’s performance.  That was from 1943, but I watched three more of her films, all from 1941, and each confirms her actor-father’s judgment that she was “born to be bad,” a characterization she managed to escape by becoming a director herself.  In High Sierra (Wiki), opposite Humphrey Bogart, and The Sea Wolf (Wiki), opposite John Garfield, she plays thinly-veiled prostitutes on the run.  Returning to her British roots in Ladies in Retirement (Wiki), she’s a Victorian ladies companion, who turns to murder in desperation to keep her two “peculiar” sisters out of an institution.  All are watchable if you get pleasure from old Hollywood studio movies, but none is an unmissable classic.
 
I’ve always been averse to a simpering quality in the sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Haviland, but each of them did some good work outside of their routine performances, probably having to do with the quality of director they were working with.  Fontaine shows some surprising wit in Frenchman’s Creek (Wiki), Mitchell Leisen’s adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier novel.  This Restoration-era costume drama set in Cornwall is shot in eye-popping Technicolor and was in 1944 the most expensive film Paramount had ever made.  It’s sort of bodice-ripper in which no bodices are ripped, as Lady Dona’s romance with a French pirate seems rather chaste.  It’s all quite lush and absurd, a fitfully-amusing piece of wartime escapist entertainment.
 
Film history is my history, in more than one sense, and among the pleasures of seeing or re-seeing American movies from my younger years is being reminded of -or introduced to - the culture of the period.  But the main draw for Angel Face (Wiki), an Otto Preminger film noir from 1953, was Jean Simmons as the eponymous femme fatale.  Robert Mitchum is aloof and impassive, too tough to be taken in, but still caught in her web of intrigue.  Leon Ames steals the show as a fancy lawyer who knows how to play the jury for a not-guilty verdict.  This film has an amusing backstory as Howard Hughes’ revenge on Simmons for cutting off her hair to spite him – check out the stiff wigs she was made to wear all the way through.
 
One appeal of the Criterion Channel derives from its genetic connection with TCM, which provides retrospective window into 20^th century English-language film, and by now even those of the 90s are “oldies.”  Here are a couple of former favorites I was happy to revisit, both by directors who were among “10<50,” my film series at the Clark on its 50^th anniversary, celebrating the best directors under fifty.
 
Alexander Payne first broke through with Election (MC-83), which deserves inclusion on any list of the best films about politics, albeit about a student government contest in Omaha, Nebraska.  Reece Witherspoon was great as a go-getting high schooler, and startlingly young in retrospect.  Matthew Broderick was also first-rate as the teacher she bedevils.  The film holds up for hilarious satire, but seems even more incisive about the nature of our politics.  And Payne continues to make good films, up through The Holdovers so far.
 
Cameron Crowe followed up Say Anything with the equally-endearing Singles (MC-71), before hitting an early peak with Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, whose success he has not come close to matching since.  Singles follows a group of Seattle twentysomethings in the early grunge era, and boasts winning performances from Campbell Scott, Bridget Fonda, Matt Dillon, and Kyra Sedgwick.  Crowe’s period rom-com has a notable authenticity when compared to something like Reality Bites, where Ben Stiller wastes the likes of Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke.
 
Speaking of Hawke, another 90s film that seemed worth another look was Gattaca (MC-64), one of the rare sci-fi films that I remember liking.  And it’s certainly the pairing of Hawke with Uma Thurman - whom he would soon marry - that gives the film luster.  Along with Jude Law, some notable cameos, and the overall theme of genetic engineering.  Not sure Andrew Nicoll’s film held up on second look, but it’s certainly worth a first.
 
Going back to earlier collections, I watched some films that may have rotated off the channel by now.  Having found surprising depth in Linda Darnell, I thought to give another unfamiliar Forties star a chance.  I’m afraid I still can’t see the appeal of Gene Tierney, but I found Leave Her to Heaven (Wiki) quite interesting nonetheless.  Shading noir into Sirkian Technicolor melodrama, it offers lavishly photographed vacation spots in New Mexico, Georgia, and Maine, with Tierney insanely (indeed murderously) jealous of husband Cornel Wilde (hard to imagine all round).  One of the most popular films of the immediate post-WWII era, this is a (sometimes inadvertently) entertaining cultural time capsule.
 
The continuing relevance of the Scopes trial was highlighted in reviews of Brenda Wineapple’s recent book about it, Keeping the Faith.  So when Criterion’s collection of “Courtroom Dramas” included Inherit the Wind (Wiki), I gave it another look.  Written as a parable of McCarthyism in the 1950s, this play was filmed by Stanley Kramer, famous at the time for his middlebrow liberalism, and stars Spencer Tracy as Clarence Darrow’s stand-in, Fredric March as William Jennings Bryan’s, and a nondancing Gene Kelly as the acerbic journalist H.L. Mencken’s.  They’re all quite good, and the dramatized issues of militant fundamentalism seem up to the minute, even though the trial happened a century ago.
 
In the same collection, I was attracted by the cast of Runaway Jury (MC-61) even though it was directed by a guy I never heard of, and based on an author I’ve never deigned to read, even while selling lots of his books back in the day – John Grisham.  But John Cusack, Rachel Weisz, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman? – sounds like a must-see.  Unfortunately, no.  That group can keep you watching, but nothing else about the film seems at all plausible.  And given the continuing relevance of mass shootings, this legal drama about the culpability of gun manufacturers is tissue-thin.
 
That may be a downbeat end to a celebratory survey, but you can bet I’ll be back with further explorations of Criterion.  I’ll break off here and return soon with surveys of new releases on Kanopy and on Netflix, with Mubi on the horizon.