A GRIM BEAUTY IN TWO FRENCH FILMS

Aline Issermann’s “The Destiny of Juliette” and Gabriel Auer’s “The Eyes of the Birds,” this week’s offerings in the Contemporary French Cinema series at UCLA, are both superbly made studies of individuals enduring tyranny and oppression, and both are drawn from actual experiences. Not surprisingly, they are hard to take, but they are most certainly worth the effort, instances of human suffering redeemed by beautiful imagery.

Spanning 20 years, starting in 1962, the first tells of a pretty, auburn-haired teen-ager (Laure Duthilleul) trapped into an arranged marriage with a rail-station worker (Richard Borhringer) by her disintegrating rural family. The husband is so obtuse and absolute a male chauvinist that he is an ever-growing affront to the dignity of his wife, who grows increasingly unyielding to him as a result.

Although “The Destiny of Juliette” does lay bare the unjust obstacles to divorce, it is not a feminist tract but instead takes a tragic view of this marriage in which the husband in his ignorance and self-destructiveness becomes far more a victim than his wife, sustained as she is by the love of her daughter and of nature.

The second takes its title from a little girl’s explanation of a picture she is giving her father while visiting him in a Uruguayan penitentiary for political prisoners. He wonders what the bright circles are in her picture of trees, and she tells him that they are the eyes of the birds which she has been forbidden to paint for him, birds being symbols of freedom. “The Eyes of the Birds” takes place during a visit by a Red Cross delegation, which allows Auer to reveal the hideous discrepancy between official appearances and the actual terrible conditions in the prison. “The Eyes of the Birds” depicts with all but unbearable conviction the systematic physical and mental destruction of these political dissidents. A presentation of the UCLA Film Archives and the 1985 French-American Film Workshop, these films screen tonight at 8 in Melnitz Theater.

Also continuing at Melnitz is the wonderfully entertaining Thursday evening (at 8) Browning/Whale series. “Outside the Law” (1921), long thought lost, was the second of the nine films Lon Chaney made with Browning and offers a chance to see “The Man of a 1,000 Faces” before he became a star. Priscilla Dean, best remembered as Harry Langdon’s demure, sightless love in Frank Capra’s “The Strong Man,” is here a gambler’s daughter menaced by bad guy Chaney, who also plays a Chinese servant. Much of the film takes place in an apartment on San Francisco’s Knob (sic) Hill, which is too bad since the Chinatown sequences are so amusingly exotic. Playing with it is Whale’s “Impatient Maiden” (1932), a nifty romantic comedy starring Mae Clark as a self-possessed young secretary leery of marriage--even to nice guy Lew Ayres. An added plus is its now-vanished Bunker Hill locales. For Melnitz screening information: 825-2581, 825-2953.

The Nuart’s Monday evening Satyajit Ray series presents “Aparajito” (1956), the second part of his famed Apu Trilogy, and “Two Daughters” (1961), which is comprised of two stories by Rabindranath Tagore revealing the obtuseness of two well-educated, rather similar young men. Although highly regarded by many, “Two Daughters” seems too slight to hold interest through its long, static sequences. Nuart’s Wednesday Ozu/Mizoguchi double feature is Mizoguchi’s “Sansho the Bailiff” (1954) and Ozu’s “End of Summer” (1961). The first is a harrowing yet sublime work that has to do with the exceptionally cruel fate of an 11th-Century noblewoman, played by the incomparable Kinuyo Tanaka.

“End of Summer,” Ozu’s penultimate film, concerns the disintegration of a Kyoto family. The illness and subsequent death of the elderly, life-loving patriarch (Ganjiro Nakamura) causes his relatives to examine their own lives and make decisions about their respective destinies. Ozu laments the dissolution of the family unit--and by extension a passing of Old Japan--but counsels with both humor and sadness that it is wisest to accept the inevitable.

For show times: 478-6379, 479-5269.