‘PASSAGE’ ENDS UCLA NEW FRENCH DIRECTORS SERIES

The New French Directors series at UCLA Melnitz concludes Wednesday at 8 p.m. with a winner, Laurent Perrin’s “Passage Secret.” Not since Jean-Jacques Beineix’s “Diva” has a film by a French newcomer been so smashing, yet Perrin is actually more exciting because he resists Beineix’s flash. “Passage Secret’s” gorgeous, muted look and the forceful, intimate use of the camera gives the film a thoroughly fresh and distinctive quality. Its story is equally offbeat, to say the least. Its key figure is a coolly beautiful Paris bartender (Dominique Laffin) who Fagin-style runs a gang of youthful crooks--several are even pre-teens. Perrin contemplates conflicts between ambition and emotion, loyalty and betrayal, innocence and cynicism, as they emerge from an increasingly intricate plot. Phone: (213) 825-2345.

Also continuing at Melnitz is a comprehensive survey of Indian cinema. Screening Saturday at 4:30 p.m. and Sunday at 8 p.m. is Ketan Mehta’s “Holi” (“The Festival of Fire”), an explosive indictment of India’s corrupt, indolent college system which cripples rather than educates its youth. It’s amazing that a film so reminiscent of Italian Neo-Realism in its raw, spontaneous power and masterful use of non-professionals is actually based on a play--and, what’s more, is composed of just 40 shots in its two-hour running time. Its title is ironic: the sacrificial fire of the traditional Holi festival consumes rather than renews youthful energy.

Screening Saturday at 8 p.m. in Melnitz is Kumar Shahan’s 170-minute “Tarang” (“Wages and Profits”), a boldly beautiful attempt to express social criticism within a popular form, which means that Shahan, in the Sirkian manner, has raised soap opera to the level of a serious epic of modern Indian life. Transforming the sensational into the tragic, Shahan packs ingredients familiar to watchers of “Dynasty” or “Dallas”: he throws suicide, murder, corruption, and adultery into a complex power struggle within an ailing industrialist’s family and its bitter war with the company’s employees, pressing for better wages. It stars darkly stunning Smita Patil as the young, desperately impoverished widow of a labor agitator.

This weekend’s program at the County Museum of Art’s “50 Years of Films From the Museum of Modern Art” tribute reminds us that not all the films chosen for restoration and preservation are great and timeless. (Indeed, dated films tell us lots about the values, mores and tastes of their eras.)

Following the 8 p.m. Saturday screening of Howard Hawks’ famed “Scarface” is the William K. Howard rarity, “Transatlantic” (1931). The equally rare “Folies Bergere” (1935) and “Reaching for the Moon” (1931) screen Friday at 1 and 8 p.m.

Yet there are good reasons--e.g., important stars, directors or technicians--for preserving these three pictures in light of the impossible ideal of preserving all old films that aren’t already lost to us. A strictly second-rate “Grand Hotel” on the high seas, “Transatlantic” is especially valuable on two counts: (1) James Wong Howe’s glorious, innovative camera-work, a textbook example of how an inspired cinematographer can help the director provide mystery and mood all too absent from the script; (2) a glimpse of what life was like aboard one of those long-vanished great ocean liners. Edmund Lowe stars as a gallant gambler on the run; a marcelled and lovely Myrna Loy is sixth-billed in a thankless role as a dutiful young wife to a middle-aged cad.

“Transatlantic” is also a triumph of Art Deco, right down to the designs on the liner’s playing cards, and that’s also true of the lavish “Reaching for the Moon,” a tedious satire on business in which a brash--obnoxious even--mogul (Douglas Fairbanks Sr., nearing the finish of his career) also ends up on an ocean liner. As a Maurice Chevalier vehicle, “Folies Bergere” is pretty rickety in comparison to Lubitsch’s “The Love Parade” and Mamoulian’s “Love Me Tonight,” but it does have Chevalier, a saucy Ann Sothern and an awesomely beautiful Merle Oberon.