You might already be praying in vain for just one day of silence—when we’ve got at least four years of this noise ahead—but at least this weekend you can have a Day of Silents. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s annual winter program takes place this Sun/2 at SF Jazz Center on Franklin near Civic Center. Not that this will be a mum event, of course: Each of the four programs features live musical accompaniment from different ensembles, with multi-instrumentalist Mas Koga participating in two of them.
First up at noon is 1924’s The Navigator, which is no longer among Buster Keaton’s most famous or highly regarded films—but was actually his biggest hit, and for a time at least regarded by the man himself as his best. He and Kathryn McGuire play two spoiled rich kids attempting to fend for themselves when cast adrift on a large, crewless passenger ship. Among the many good ideas here are a scene where Buster (temporarily stuck at the bottom of the sea in a diving suit) has a sword-fight with a swordfish. Your jaw may drop at the retro racial stereotypes on display when our protagonists find themselves combatting loincloth-clad dusky island natives at the climax. But it’s all too deliberately ridiculous to cause serious offense.
A decade later, the silent era was ancient history in Hollywood. But it was still going on in Japan, where Yasujiro Ozu made A Story of Floating Weeds—a poignant tale of life in a traveling kabuki theater troupe. This delicate seriocomedy’s fame has been somewhat eclipsed by the same director’s even more acclaimed remake (in sound and color) a quarter-century later. It is, nonetheless, one of the greatest Japanese silent features…as well as one of the last.
Next there’s an invasion of high-society Beautiful People in the 1927 Children of Divorce, which young Josef von Sternberg purportedly helped salvage after Paramount deemed director Frank Lloyd’s finished film unreleasable. That’s a bit hard to believe, since Lloyd was a proven hit-maker whose career would peak with the Clark Gable Mutiny on the Bounty seven years later. Also because this admittedly soapy contrivance remains a fine showcase for the very popular leads, Clara Bow and Esther Ralston. Their male co-stars were at the beginning and end of respective careers: Gary Cooper had gotten his first significant screen role just the year before, catching “It Girl” Bow’s eye. Whereas Elnar Hanson had arrived from Sweden with Greta Garbo and director Mauritz Stiller in 1925, immediately winning major studio contracts. But a DUI accident would end that ascent, and his life, just two months after Children (which plays at 4:30 pm) was released.
If that movie is a sentimental indictment of modern morals, the same year’s Chicago is a giddy sendup of the same. Yes, this is that Chicago, more or less—the first screen version of the play that was (very loosely) based on then-recent, lurid court cases in which real-life jazz babies got put on trial for shooting their lovers dead. The material later got turned into 1942 Ginger Rogers vehicle Roxie Hart, then musicalized as the endlessly running 1975 Broadway show and its much-Oscar’d 2002 film translation. Frank Urson’s silent flick is the least-celebrated in this entire lot. But it’s still the whole package: A cynical satire of hardboiled flappers, sleazy lawyers, tabloid newspaper sensationalism, and corrupt courts at the peak of the Roaring Twenties. Nearing its centenary, this comedy retains much snap as any of the later incarnations.
Full info on the “Day of Silents” program, schedule and tickets can be found here.
Also arriving this weekend, on local screens and streaming platforms:
Santosh
A first narrative feature for British-Indian documentarian Sandhya Suri, this potent drama is a bit like Training Day with a gender switch, and a lot more sociopolitical critique. Shahana Goswami plays the title character, a young widow whose policeman husband is killed by a rock thrown during a riot. While tradition decrees she stay with her hateful in-laws, they reject her; nor does Santosh want to retreat to her own parents’ home. Dismayed to discover her late spouse was a cop too briefly to provide her with any substantial pension, she’s surprised to learn there’s a different program for people like her: Widows can actually “inherit” the deceased’s job, retaining the same salary even if their duties are somewhat different.
Seizing that means of independence, Santosh undergoes training in her rural north Indian burg, then begins work as a constable. It is somewhat sobering to realize the extent to which her male superiors abuse their power and talk trash about those they ostensibly protect, particularly lower-caste members and women. She is glad, then, to be taken under the wing of an older female veteran, Inspector Sharma (Sunita Rajwar). But that mentorship, too, ends up instilling a powerful load of disillusionment. Particularly when they both become involved in investigating the disappearance, rape, and murder of a poor family’s 15-year-old daughter.
Religious and caste prejudices, blaming-the-victim, protection of the corrupt all emerge as everyday realities in this morally complex tale, which can’t quite be classified as a thriller but packs considerable punch nonetheless. You won’t be that surprised to learn that here, wealth can not only shield the guilty, but permit some innocent party to be scapegoated in order to preserve the illusion of “justice being served.” Then again, that kind of institutionalized bias looks to be a growing trend in the US, making Santosh feel discomfitingly relevant. It opens at S.F.’s AMC Kabuki on Fri/31.
Rose
Algeria-born Francoise Fabian started out in French cinema as a glamorous ingenue in the mid-1950s, later appearing in films by Malle, Bunuel, Rohmer, Rivette, Lelouch, Ozon, et al. Now she’s in her early 90s, still active—and playing a 78-year-old who looks a decade younger in this drama from actress turned writer-director Aurelie Saada. Rose is introduced as the contrastingly modest longtime spouse to extrovert Philippe (Bernard Murat), who’s celebrating a milestone birthday in high style. But he’s also hiding a serious diagnosis. By the time the opening credits have ended, Rose is a widow, disconsolate to the point of worrying her several adult children, including the ne’er-do-well son (Damien Chapelle) still living with her.
Rose has taken its time getting here—it got released in France late 2021—and one can see why. Saada excels at the sort of busy domestic ensemble scenes often characteristic of French filmmaking, though here they’re indulged such that the movie is nearly half over before it finds its character and story focus. That would be Rose’s own new lease on life, as she commences a surprise affair with a younger cafe owner (Pascal Elbe) and otherwise shocks her still-needy, argumentative offspring. Their own lives are not exactly in perfect order… yet they self-righteously freak out once mom learns to drink, drive, and enjoy herself to a slightly messy degree.
At first too digressive, then too rushed, this is still a worthwhile directorial debut. It affords its star a big climactic speech in which she asserts the rights of elders to retain independence—and even pass out drunk on their apartment floor once in a while, if the mood strikes. Rose opens Fri/31 at SF’s Opera Plaza Cinemas.
Collect This Trash: Cult & Genre Finds New To Streaming
No matter how dedicated a cineaste you are, there are always obscure corners of the medium’s past around the globe that remain to be discovered—and, hopefully, a specialty platform or distributor ready to do the excavation work and make them available.
Subscription video-on-demand service OVID, always a good source for movies off the beaten mainstream track, has just dug up some particularly rare international nuggets. Three are grouped under the title “Dalei Gothic: Japanese Ghost Stories.” While in recent years that nation has conspicuously dominated a “New Asian Horror” wave whose biggest hits (The Ring, The Grudge etc.) generated Hollywood remakes, in the 1960s it had already cornered a certain market in richly atmospheric tales of otherworldly terror.
Kenji Misumi’s 1959 The Ghost of Yotsuya, Satsuo Yamamoto’s 1968 The Bride From Hades and Tokuzo Tanaka’s same-year The Snow Woman are all handsomely mounted, widescreen color period pieces in which beautiful women haunt men from beyond the grave. In Ghost, a cruelly abusive samurai finds the wife he’d murdered returning for vengeance. In Snow, a wintery wraith assumes mortal form to marry the oblivious sculptor whose life she spared, but that ruse can’t last. In Bride, a mysterious female duo are battled by an entire village when they turn out to have lethal designs on one besotted schmo’s life force. These are graceful if slow-moving exercises that make full use of Japanese studios’ meticulous soundstage craftsmanship.
A bizarre cross of Time Bandits and Beckett—or as OVID puts it, “Tarkovsky circa Solaris directing Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”—Georgiy Daneliya’s 1986 Kin-dza-dza! is a singular product of the late Soviet era. It begins as two previously unacquainted men (Stanislav Lyubshin, Evgeniy Leonov) find themselves whisked from a Moscow street to a lost space alien’s home planet, Pluke.
There, matchsticks are extremely valuable, language is largely limited to the all-purpose exclamation “Kyu!,” and oppression takes a very Russian, absurdist form to the sound of an oompah-brass score. A cult film popular enough at home to generate an eventual animated remake, this distinctive, inventive whatsit may be a little too culturally specific (despite the Idiocracy parallels) for foreign viewers to fully grok—especially at 135 minutes. But it is an original.
As someone with more than a passing fondness for vintage Italian exploitation movies, I was surprised I’d never even heard of the late subject in Life As A B-Movie: Piero Vivarelli, now streaming on Film Movement. But the Siena-born writer and director rubbed elbows with a heady array of personalities, from better-known filmmakers Lucio Fulci and Umberto Lenzi to journalist Oriana Fallaci and even Fidel Castro, who personally gave him a Communist Party of Cuba membership card. That was a big leap from his early years as a wartime neo-fascist. But then Vivarelli was a man of many contradictions, and/or plain excesses. He moved from writing pop lyrics to making pop-music movies (with Italian music stars like Rita Pavone, plus one with a perpetually nodding-out Chet Baker), then penned the screenplay for Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 Django—the biggest of all “spaghetti westerns” not directed by Sergio Leone.
From there he went on to create comic-book-like spy spoofs, and pioneer a particular “exotic-erotic” subgenre of softcore sex films before a serious car accident greatly slowed his productivity. Still, he somehow managed to seduce numerous beautiful women (despite being a pretty dumpy, middle-aged Adonis), have children he neglected with many of them, book first Italian concerts for Led Zeppelin and other major acts, et al. Various bemused erstwhile friends and lovers interviewed here—including Franco Nero, Emir Kusturica and fan Quentin Tarantino—attest to his being a “transgressive character” whose works were often more politically charged than they appeared on the surface. Is he ripe for re-evaluation? I’m not entirely sure such titles as Satanik, The Black Decameron or Summer Temptations would bear that out. Still, Fabrizio Laurenti and Niccolo Vivarelli’s documentary is a fun footnote.
Finally, there’s some brand-new prime psychotronic silliness: This Fri/31 genre platform Shudder begins streaming Dark Match, which premiered at the Fantasia festival last summer. Coming from Lowell Dean, the writer-director of Canadian horror comedy Wolfcop, it is almost certain to stand as the year’s most delectable mashup of show wrestling and Satanic thriller.
Ayisha Issa plays our main protagonist amongst a group of grizzled ring athletes touring the hinterlands to paltry crowds. They’re hardly in a position to turn down a lucrative private gig at a remote ski lodge-type compound. But of course it turns out this is no mere party or even a competition, so much as an unholy “sacrifice” to which they are being served up. Their host turns out to be an old frenemy of the heroine’s, essayed by ex-WWE star Chris Jericho.
Dark Match is trash of a knowing, pseudo-retro-grindhouse stripe, sporting quotemarks around its gratuitous sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll violence. But it’s also well-made, lively and colorful in its zesty bad-taste fillips. It doesn’t treat itself as a joke; it’s more in the realm of being in on its own joke. Almost too good to be considered a guilty pleasure, this is smart schlock not for the fainthearted, but hard to resist for those who pine for the disreputable drive-in days of yore.
