5 Films That Need More Love
Yeah, I know I said I’d return to “People I Knew” today but I wanted to do this more (especially given how popular my film posts tend to be). Not to toot my own horn, but I noticed that people tend to take my film recs seriously. With that in mind, here are five films I really love which I don’t hear discussed very much (at least among my peer group).
The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
Remade/ripped-off in the nineties as You’ve Got Mail, but that picture doesn’t deserve to even be mentioned in the same breath as this absolute stunner. This is one of those flicks where absolutely everything is just so and it’s simply stunning in its perfection. A lilting, melancholy Christmas story set in Budapest, this is a paean to a humanistic Mitteleuopa which never really existed but which would nice to think did (shades of Stefan Zweig and the much later Grand Budapest Hotel here) and which was in the process of being eliminated by the Nazis. Director Ernst Lubitsch was known for his so-called “Lubitsch touch” — small, unscripted details which suggested something more, typically sexual innuendo but also little moments of human grace, happiness and heartbreak. From the slanting of the cafe light onto the snowbound streets to the musical cigarette boxes to Margaret Sullavan’s gloved hand desperately searching for a nonexistent letter in her P.O. box, Lubitsch manages to convey the lovely, heartbreaking, and humanistic details of everyday life perfectly. Frank Morgan — the Wizard of Oz himself — also turns in an absolutely breathtaking performance as Mr. Matuschek, the leather goods shop owner who transforms from the prototypical grouchy old man to a fellow touched by grace and love. The fact that Lubitsch was a Jewish man from Berlin — despite coming to Hollywood eleven years before the Nazis seized power — lends the film that much of a political, lost-world-of-Central-Europe edge.
Au Hasard Balthazar (Balthazar, at Random) (1966)
Today would’ve been the 122nd birthday of Robert Bresson, and what better way of honoring him than promoting this, his masterpiece of suffering and redemption? There’s no other way to explain this but it’s as if Bresson erased the boundary between camera and life; you don’t feel like you’re watching a movie but that you’re right there in this little French village, and everything is unfolding before your very eyes. The story is simplicity itself: the on-again, off-again love affair between a girl and her pet donkey (the titular Balthazar), who are both treated with immense cruelty by the world for no apparent reason. Joining them in their suffering is the girl’s father — bankrupted by the jealous townsmen — and Arnold, the town drunk who takes a shine to Balthazar but can never escape his outcast status. Balthazar is Christ as a donkey, baptized at the beginning and thus cursed with the fate of suffering and sacrifice; crucially, he is never anthropomorphized, but there is more humanity in his plaintive brays than the quips uttered by going-through-the-motions actors in a million blockbusters. Absolutely tremendous ending, too, which I won’t spoil but which once seen can never be removed from one’s mind.
3 Women (1977)
Robert Altman was a director who made his fair share of junk and interesting-but-inert misfires, but this a truly slept-on entry in his extensive canon. Both Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek are in top form as two women who shift in and out of one another’s personalities throughout the film, with Duvall especially excelling as the seemingly popular (yet actually despised) and ultimately sad and crumpled Millie. The third woman — the nearly mute Janice Rule — haunts the edges of the film, greatly pregnant and constantly painting strange murals reminiscent of Minoan frescoes. This is the American Persona, a waking nightmare of Freudian fear in the weird desert apartments of outer Southern California; if you loved Mulholland Drive (as every self-respecting film zoomer does), you’ll love this as well. Summarizing the plot is nigh-impossible and honestly ruins the entire experience, so just watch it and let the watery weirdness of the whole thing wash over you.
Blow Out (1981)
Simultaneously a tribute to Antonioni’s Blow-Up (this time with sound recording rather than photography as the technological witness to murder), a hyperactive investigation of American political paranoia, and the ultimately Philly film (yes, perhaps more than Rocky). This, to me, is Brian De Palma’s finest hour: it’s got his off-kilter sense of humor, love of Hitchcock, voyeurism, political rage, and flashy visuals all wrapped out in a cracked-out Philadelphia package. It’s got so many perfect shots of Philly at its early-eighties nadir, with America’s horrors creeping out of the grit and grime and exploding with the rocket’s red glare and the bombs bursting in air. Contains Travolta’s best-ever performance as the cocky soundman who — after accidentally recording a political assassination — finds himself way over this head and rushing to protect the woman he loves (Nancy Allen) from the relentless manifestation of American evil (John Lithgow — something is truly wrong with that man). You’ll never wanna go to 30th Street Station ever again after watching this. The ending is perhaps the most emotionally intense and heartbreaking in American cinema.
Barton Fink (1991)
An underrated gem in the Coen brothers’ oeuvre, and the film which single-handedly switched my opinion of them. This unclassifiable noir thriller/period piece/dark screwball comedy/World War II allegory contains a rogue’s gallery of absolutely dynamite performances, from John Turturro as the title character — an out-of-touch wannabe radical who suffers for his art to a way greater degree than he could ever anticipate — to John Goodman as a secretly psychotic traveling salesman, the later Michael Lerner and Tony Shalhoub as unscrupulous movie studio men, and John Mahoney pushing himself way out of his “Frasier’s dad” comfort zone as the perma-drunk William Faulkner analogue, who recites high-flown bon mots about life and art and proceeds to piss on a tree while warbling racist Stephen Foster songs. Barton is both the Coens’ most specifically Jewish character outside of A Serious Man and also one of their finest, most-well rounded creations: he’s simultaneously a pretentious prick who uses and abuses others and also completely sympathetic, a man who’s trapped in never-ending cycle of suffering and abuse, a Job who’s never restored to his former glory by the Lord. One of the greatest American films of the nineties, and while its sheer unclassifiable probably contributed to its tepic box office receipts, it’s aged better than ninety percent of flicks from that era. Just kick back and let it show you the life of the mind.