INDIA FILM FEST ENDS WITH SEN MOVIES

UCLA Film Archives’ “Classic Films From India” series concludes with a weekend of Mrinal Sen films, including repeats of several already screened at Melnitz Theater. “Oka Oorie Katha” (“A Village Story”) and “Kharij” (“The Case Is Closed”) are strong, eloquent works in protest of indifference to human suffering.

As its title suggests, “A Village Story” (1977)--also known as “The Outsider”--has a rural setting. “Once in the quicksand of work, you’ll be sucked to death,” insists a wiry, fiercely cynical peasant (Vasudeva Rao) to his son (Narayana Rao). As a result, the two men, who live in a mud hut, work as little as possible and steal what they can. The father scandalizes his neighbors with his philosophy and his actions, but his resistance, which he is capable of carrying to comic outrageousness, gives a bitter perspective to the terrible exploitation of the peasants by the unscrupulous, uncaring landlords. In this light, the father can be seen as an admirable, if ornery, rebel.

But everything changes when the son marries and his wife (Mamata Shankar) becomes pregnant; the callousness of the master has infected the father to a greater degree than he realizes. Yet it’s the all-powerful, not the powerless, that Sen finally condemns. You can all but taste the dust of “A Village Story” (5 p.m. Saturday), which unfolds at a deliberately measured pace against hot, dry and static landscapes.

Like “A Village Story,” “The Case Is Closed” (1982) reverberates with an angry irony. It’s set in Calcutta during the cold wave in the winter of 1981. A young middle-class couple (Anjan Dutt, Mamata Shankar) with a small son live in a small, shabby but comfortable apartment. A man (Debapratim Das Gupta) from a region beset by famine persuades the couple to hire his son, not much older than the couple’s own adored child, as a servant.

No sooner do we meet this boy of about 10 than he is found dead in the building’s unventilated communal kitchen; in seeking refuge from the cold--he and another young servant regularly sleep under the apartment building’s open staircase--the boy has fallen victim to carbon monoxide poisoning from a coal stove. All that stood between the child’s life and death was the offer of a blanket or a mattress spread out on the couple’s living room floor.

Sen is remorseless in watching the couple squirm in their guilt and evasion of responsibility, but gradually he enlarges his view to indict all of society. As in “A Village Story” (8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday), he also proceeds beyond social protest to the truly tragic.

Sen’s “Bhuvan Shome” follows “The Case Is Closed” on Saturday only, and his “Akhaler Sandhane” (“In Search of Famine”) screens at 5 p.m. Sunday. These Sen films are outstanding, and we can be grateful that this fine Indian series has provided an invaluable introduction to a major contemporary film maker. Information: (213) 825-9261, 825-2581.

The Beverly Cinema, 7165 Beverly Blvd., offers an opportunity to compare early and recent Godard when it screens Wednesday and Thursday “Contempt” (1964) and “Detective” (1985), that policier transformed into a philosophical discourse on the meaning of life (or lack of same). The first, which was freely adapted from an Alberto Moravia novel, is an allegory involving a screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) who faces a crisis in his marriage (to Brigitte Bardot, never better or more beautiful as his contemptuous wife) while adapting “The Odyssey” for director Fritz Lang, playing himself, and for ruthless and tyrannical producer Jack Palance.

With its rhythmic, restless movement, “Contempt” involves us with the writer’s plight, with its increasing parallels to that of Ulysses. “Contempt” has been given a lush look by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and a romantic score by Georges Delerue. Information: (213) 938-4038.