Six Yugoslav Features on UCLA Schedule

UCLA Film Archives’ “Yugoslav Film Today” series presents six more features this week in Melnitz Theater. As before, they are of varying merit, and they all possess a heavy quality and a slowness of pace that makes all but the very finest Yugoslav films a chore to watch.

What’s most impressive about all the films in this series is their candor about life in a socialist state, in the past and in the present. Zoran Tadic’s “Dreaming of a Rose” (1986), which screens at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, is a low-key psychological study of how an impoverished steel worker (Rade Serbedzija) reacts when a large sum of stolen money comes his way. It is followed at 7:30 by a repeat of the grim, remorseless “Balkan Spy” and then Zivko Nikolic’s “Unseen Wonder” (1984), an earthy comedy about a sexy woman (Savina Gersak) from America who returns to her ancestral Montenegran fishing village, where one of the locals is cooking up a crazy irrigation scheme. The film at first recalls vintage Italian comedy--until it meanders hopelessly.

The most ambitious of these six is Karpo Godina’s imaginative and unsettling “The Medusa Raft” (1980), in which some restless young people in the ‘20s, far from the heady capitals of Berlin and Paris of the era, join up with a traveling strong man to form a kind of Dada-esque cabaret. It screens at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and is followed by Dejan Sorak’s “The Small Train Robbery” (1984), which stars the warm, burly Bata Zivojinovic as a bandit on the Bosnia-Croatia border near the end of World War I. There’s a hearty, bemused “Butch Cassidy” quality here that’s allowed to dissipate rapidly through a lack of pacing.

Although it’s too long, Misa Radivojvic’s “The Promising Young Man” (1981) is a fairly amusing comedy about a medical student (Aleksandar Bercek) rebelling against his bourgeois background when he receives a conk on the head and aspires to become a punk rocker--shades of “Desperately Seeking Susan.” It screens at 7:30 p.m. Sunday and is followed by Srdjan Karanovic’s ponderous, punishing “Caught in the Throat” (1985), about a reunion of.40-year-olds that turns into an extravagantly nasty drunken spree; clearly, Karanovic has more contempt than compassion for his own generation.

Information: (213) 825-2581.