MOVIE REVIEW : THE PAST EXERTS ITS SPELL IN ‘ORIANE’

Venezuelan film maker Fina Torres’ “Oriane” (Beverly Center Cineplex) is an exquisite, languorous journey into the past, seductive in its beauty and aura of mystery. It is most impressive as a debut film and took important prizes at Cannes and Chicago in 1985.

An elegant, 30ish woman named Maria (Daniela Silverio) receives word in France that her Aunt Oriane has died and left her the family hacienda in Venezuela, a place she visited only once, as an adolescent. She discovers the estate in ruins, all but reclaimed by the jungle. The caretaker (Aadrubai Melandez) apologizes, saying he’s done the best he could and that his mistress wished everything left untouched anyway. “I don’t know what she expected from the dust,” he remarks.

As Maria wanders through the vast place, ostensibly taking inventory for the sale of the property and its contents, she is gradually overcome by memories of some 20 years past, thus triggering a flashback in which we meet the pretty, adolescent Maria (Maya Oloe) and the darkly beautiful Oriane (Doris Wells).

One of Torres’ key accomplishments is her charming and accurate portrayal of adolescent curiosity, and it could scarcely receive a richer stimulus than here. Just for openers, why has Oriane, a serene enigma, never left the estate in her entire life? What does the brusque housekeeper-cook (Mirtha Borges) mean when she sharply reminds her mistress that “What is buried must stay buried!”? “Oriane” takes us back to our own childhood when we first pored through old trunks and boxes and became intrigued with family secrets.

“Oriane,” however, is not really a mystery. While Torres and co-writer Antoine Lacomblez, in adapting a short story by Marvel Moreno, never spell anything out, they make their implications perfectly clear in yet another set of flashbacks--to Oriane herself as both a teen-ager and a child (indeed, it’s easy enough to decipher Oriane’s secret long before we’re given all the clues). But the film isn’t meant to be a guessing game but rather a psychological mood piece in which an adult woman at last comes to understand what she couldn’t fully comprehend as an adolescent.

The level of Maria’s youthful comprehension is as delicately calibrated and beautifully expressed by Oloe as is cameraman Jean-Claude Larrieu’s luminous lighting of the rough-textured interiors of the ancient hacienda. In a film of the most subtle and sensitive nuances it can only be assumed that its extremely hazy sense of time is deliberate, even though it’s perplexing. Judging from the clothing in all three sets of flashbacks, Maria really ought to be in her 60s rather than her 30s.

Torres may be attempting to suggest that the element of time is meaningless in regard to the past--that yesterday is as done and gone as an event that occurred decades ago--but this can only be conjecture. Torres would really have been better off setting the film’s “present” in the ‘40s or ‘30s or even earlier, because Oriane and her fate are very Victorian in spirit. Fortunately, Torres is a sufficiently captivating film maker that this perplexity is a minor distraction, however definite. “Oriane” (Times-rated Mature for complex themes and structure) is finally a fragile, even precious work that makes an appeal to the romantic in us.