What to Stream This Weekend: Seaside Frolics

Image may contain Human Person Barefoot Skin Clothing Apparel Shorts Shoreline Water Ocean Outdoors and Nature
Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom” relates the nineteen-sixties’ struggle against moral and bureaucratic constraints of with a paradoxical, terrifying, apocalyptic, yet exuberant energy.Courtesy YouTube

Each week, Richard Brody picks a classic film, a modern film, an independent film, a foreign film, and a documentary for online viewing.

It’s a commonplace to think of catastrophic floods as Biblical, but it’s the rare modern movie that reaches for such a mythic dimension—and an even rarer one that reaches it, as Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom” (Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, and other services) does. And that’s a strange fact, since it is also a great summer-camp movie and a tender, graceful young-adolescent romance—and a portrait of a marriage, a tale of adventure, and an idiosyncratic reimagination of the nineteen-sixties. Anderson’s story of the era’s struggle against narrow-minded constraints of morality and bureaucracy has a paradoxical, terrifying, apocalyptic, yet exuberant energy. Here, nature, human nature, and divine purpose sublimely coincide. Also, of course, there are performances by the Andersonian stalwarts Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman, along with Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, and Bob Balaban, plus the two poetically precocious stars, Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward (who had cameos last year in Jim Jarmusch’s “Paterson”).

Ingmar Bergman’s “Summer with Monika,” from 1953 (FilmStruck, Amazon, and iTunes), is another seaside idyll for adolescents—older ones, in Stockholm, in constrained circumstances from which they seek a rebellious liberation. The headstrong, free-spirited Monika (Harriet Andersson), who’s eighteen, comes from a poor family that’s cramped together in a tiny flat. She works in a meagre grocery store; she’s groped and pursued at work and on the street; and her romantic dreams, stoked by movies, find little outlet—until she picks up a shy, earnest, handsome young man of nineteen named Harry (Lars Ekborg), a bored shipping clerk with little focus and little ambition. Their romance becomes a big conflagration. They take Harry’s father’s motorboat and head for the wild and rocky shores, where they realize an erotic adventure that Bergman films rhapsodically, with shimmering and sun-streaked seascapes and intimate gestures. Then nature and culture join forces, they confront the law and lawlessness alike, and the idyll veers toward romantic agony. It’s one of the most recklessly passionate yet bitterly rational love stories—and tales of youth—in all cinema.

By the Bluest of Seas,” (Kanopy) is a romantic comedy made in the Soviet Union, in 1936, and directed by Boris Barnet, one of the most lyrical, delicate, hearty-humored of all filmmakers. This rowdy yet rapturous love story is set on an enchanted island of fishermen in the Caspian Sea, off the coast of Azerbaijan, where two seamen, Alyosha (Nikolai Kryuchkov) and Yussuf (Lev Sverdlin), are shipwrecked. Gazing at women laboring on the shore, they fall into the orbit, under the sway, and head-over-heels in love with the head of the local kolkhoz, the porcelain-faced, sarcastic-tongued Masha (played by Yelena Kuzmina, who is something of a Russian Carole Lombard or Miriam Hopkins), and the two men’s rivalry—pursued with vigorous comedic trickery—threatens the well-being of the collective. Barnet hits the political notes with a bluff comedic touch and integrates them into the drama’s breath-holding tenderness; he also looks with rapt wonder at the romantic seascapes. As Alyosha makes his case to Masha, Yussuf tiptoes impishly past the doorway, ukulele in hand. Later, Yussuf, pursuing Masha on the beach, hurts his foot and continues his flirtation limping and hopping along the glowing, sunlit strand with a dancer’s grace. The film is full of full-throated singing and exuberant dancing, and one scene—of Masha tearing an ill-gotten necklace off her neck as the glass beads tumble off their string in slow motion—is pure exaltation.

Eliza Hittman’s second feature, “Beach Rats,” opens next Friday; it has a few scenes set in and around Brooklyn’s beaches, but her previous film, “It Felt Like Love” (iTunes, YouTube, Amazon, and Google Play), from 2013, which is also a South Brooklyn story, seemingly lives at the beach and virtually shrieks with the alluring and distracting power of the summer sun. Lila (Gina Piersanti) is fourteen, intellectual, socially inhibited, not yet sexually active. Her best friend, Chiara, who’s about to turn sixteen, has a busy social life, a boyfriend, and experience with sex. As Lila whiles away the summer at the beach and copes with family troubles, she follows Chiara into adventures and risks both ridicule and danger in quest of sexual experience. The setup is a familiar one, but Hittman’s way with it is boldly, intimately original. Her intimate sense of the New York landscape fuses with cinematic intimacy tout court, as she films the actors’ faces and bodies with a heated, nearly tactile proximity—and adds a hard-edged view of family relations and the quietly bruising dialogue of friends and parents. There’s a wide swath of city life condensed into the movie’s brisk drama.

Another week, another film by Agnès Varda, and that’s as it should be: the eighty-nine-year-old filmmaker has a splendid film opening in October, “Faces Places.” It premièred at Cannes in May, and Cannes is one of the subjects of her color-soaked 1958 short documentary “Du Côté de la Côte” (The Criterion Channel on FilmStruck). The title means, more or less, “From the Coast’s Side of Things,” and Varda, who started out as a photographer, creates refulgent images with the sumptuous settings of the Riviera—the sea and the sky, the architecture and artifacts, the landscapes and people and cultural history. Picasso and Nietzsche crowd alongside bikinis and sunburns, straw hats and sunglasses. Varda is a heroine of style, onscreen and in person, and she revels in the stylings of coastal towns—the forms of fashion, the shapes of foliage, the intricacies of urbanistic ornamentation, and, of course, the cinema itself, with the celebrity of Brigitte Bardot illuminating the streets of Cannes. Shot by shot, line by line, moment by moment, Varda rescues the vitality and the beauty of the incidental, the haphazard, the easily overlooked—because she fills each detail with the ardent energy of her own exquisite sensibility.