AFI’s Euro Fest Stresses Quality Over Quantity

Phew! For the film festival weary, relief is on the horizon.

The American Film Institute’s fifth European Community Film Festival, opening Friday, has only 14--count ‘em--14 new films on its one-week schedule. Stressing quality over quantity, the program is a stark contrast to other festivals, trying to pack in too many pictures in too little time, which inevitably means a lessening of standards and viewer overload.

Euro Fest, to be staged at the Monica 4-Plex in Santa Monica, has the added attractions of repeat screenings of all its films, a number of significant feature directorial debuts, and a venue with plenty of convenient parking.

Of the 12 films available for preview, only one, “The Cruel Embrace” from Belgium, can’t be recommended, but even it is not without merit. The others range from the highly accessible to the quite demanding.

One of the most difficult but impressive offerings, “The Journey, the Land,” is from Luxembourg; it’s surprising that the tiny duchy produces any films at all, let alone one as sophisticated and soaringly ambitious as this one--but then Luxembourg was represented in the last Euro Fest with the stunning “Gwyncilla, Legend of the Dark Ages.”

Euro Fest concludes strongly with two films from Spain, “The House of Bernarda Alba” and “La Senyora,” which whet appetites for the UCLA Film Archives’ tribute to Pedro Almodovar and its retrospective of the Spanish cinema, which commences June 30.

Film programmers Eddie Cockrell and Ken Wlaschin are opening the festival with their most widely appealing films, the ones most likely to receive a substantial American release.

Friday: “The Dressmaker” (United Kingdom, 1 & 7:30 p.m.) and “Felix” (West Germany, 3:30 and 9:30 p.m.).

Jim O’Brien, co-director of the 15-hour “Jewel in the Crown” series, makes his feature directorial debut with “The Dressmaker,” which John McGrath adapted from Beryl Bainbridge’s novel about a 17-year-old (Jane Horrocks) whose wartime romance with an American GI thrusts her into a conflict between her two very different guardian-aunts, the prim and proper dressmaker Nellie (Joan Plowright) and the fun-loving but frustrated Margo (Billie Whitelaw). All the performances are superlative in this most unpredictable picture, but for Whitelaw it is a special triumph, leaving you to imagine what a wonderful Blanche Du Bois she would be.

Like Dorris Dorrie’s scintillating “Men . . . ,” “Felix” takes a wry and amusing look at the male animal, West German style, as its pleasant-looking, spoiled blond hero (Ulrich Tukur, a gifted farceur ) struggles to recover from his wife’s abrupt departure in a headlong pursuit of women. Each of his experiences is written and directed by a prominent woman director, and the best is by Margarethe von Trotte in a delightfully droll change of pace from her usual high seriousness. It’s the episode in which Felix has a charming encounter with the sympathetic but perplexingly unavailable Eva (Eva Mattes). Other contributors: Helma Sanders-Brahm, Helke Sander, Christel Buschmann.

Saturday : “Dandin” (France, 1 and 6:30 p.m.) and “A Boy From Calabria” (Italy, 3:30 and 8:45 p.m.). In his adaptation of Moliere’s “George Dandin,” Roger Planchon (in another impressive directorial debut) brings to the screen a rollicking, expansive joie de vivre characteristic of the classic French screen comedies. In a kind of Gallic variation on “The Taming of the Shrew,” Pierre Brasseur, in the title role, has all our sympathy as a wealthy, middle-age farmer who marries above his station--and whose tempestuous young bride Zabou) is determined to make him pay for it. The glowing, pirouetting camera work is by Bernard Lutic.

Italy’s veteran, understated master of genre Luigi Comencini brings a poignant simplicity and a mature compassion to the leisurely but lovely “A Boy From Calabria,” about a poor adolescent (Santo Polimeno) determined to become a runner despite the formidable opposition of his father (Diego Abatatuono) who wants him to concentrate on getting an education. The boy, however, is steadfastly encouraged by an avuncular bus driver (Gian Carlo Volonte, in a mellow portrayal that is in sharp contrast to his usual intense heroes).

Next Sunday: “Rami and Juliet” (Denmark, 1 and 6 p.m.) and “The Children of Helidona” (Greece, 3:30 and 8 p.m.). Erik Clausen’s “Rami and Juliet,” a critically acclaimed work that has been described as “a combined paraphrase” of “Romeo and Juliet” and “West Side Story” and set in a lower middle-class Copenhagen suburb, was unavailable for preview. Sophie Grabol (who was Gaugin’s model in “Wolf at the Door”) plays a gas station attendant in love with a Palestinian laborer (Saleh Malek).

Working from a novel by Dionyssis Chronopoulos, director Costas Vrettakos--in yet another of the festival’s knockout feature debuts--has created a dazzlingly somber, painful and majestic inquiry into Greece’s tumultuous, bitter and guilt-ridden history of its past half-century. It centers on a TV documentarian (Stephanos Leneos) attempting to research a typical small-time family whose children have not been reunited since the advent of World War II. Vrettakos, who heretofore has himself been a documentarian, peels aways layers of bitter, conflicting testimony to suggest the ultimate elusiveness of truth. Grueling, but worth the effort.

June 27: “Tall Stories” (Portugal, 1 and 7 p.m.) and “Reefer and the Model” (Ireland, 3:30 and 9 p.m.). In yet another promising feature debut, Joaquim Pinto, a veteran sound engineer, has brought economy, subtlety and grace to his slender, coolly detached tale about a 12-year-old (Bruno Leite) who glimpses the treachery of the adult world during a brief stay at his aunt’s seaside resort. Notable for its strong sense of the visual.

Writer-director Joe Comerford’s hell-for-leather “Reefer and the Model” provoked strongly divided responses at its press preview. It’s a gritty, larky tale of a trio of attractively weathered (and highly fatalistic) middle-age Irishmen who run cargo off the west coast of Ireland and who take under wing a pretty but worn and pregnant drifter and plan that one last heist. Forget airtight plotting--better yet, forget the plot entirely--and revel instead in the film’s adult, off-the-wall shenanigans. Had Howard Hawks directed “Beat the Devil,” the result might have been something like this.

June 28: “Havinck” (The Netherlands, 1 and 7 p.m.) and “The Journey, the Land” (Luxembourg, 3:30 and 9 p.m.). The other feature unavailable for preview, “Havinck” was directed by Franz Weisz from Ger Thijs’ adaptation of the novel by Marja Brouwers. It is the story of a father and daughter coping after the unexpected suicide of the family’s wife and mother. Willem Hijholt and Anne Martien Lousberg star.

In “Journey,” co-writers-directors Frank Hoffman and Paul Kieffer have taken Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country” and intercut it with their reworking of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Narrative of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket” to create a mind-boggling spectacle of a decadent, indolent 19th-Century aristocracy anticipating post-nuclear holocaust chaos in the 21st Century as a way to suggest where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

Filmed entirely in an idyllic countryside setting with a ruined old manor house, the film expresses the eternality of human longing and frustration in a disintegrating world. With its intricate structure, long stretches of poetic philosophizing and 140-minute running time, this boldly experimental film is as admirable as it is demanding.

June 29: “The Cruel Embrace” (Belgium, 1 and 7 p.m.) and “Bird Now” (Belgium, 3:30 and 9 p.m.). Marion Hansel’s adaptation of a novel by Yann Queffelec is the relentlessly grim story of a youth born of a Belgian teen-ager who had been gang-raped by American GIs. Hidden in an attic and treated like an animal until the age of 7, the unfortunate boy is not surprisingly regarded as retarded. The boy (played impeccably by Yves Cotton as a child and by Thierry Fremont as a teen) progresses from one brutalizing experience to the next until all credibility is destroyed when the matron of an insane asylum attempts a crazed seduction of him; at this point the film goes fatally over the top. Best left to masochists for all its apparent good intentions.

Marc Huraux’s “Bird Now,” a documentary (in English) on jazz saxophonist Charlie (Bird) Parker, is notable for matching the sounds of Parker’s music with evocative views of New York as it collects the reminiscences of those who knew and loved the man and the artist. (Parker died of drug abuse in 1955 and is the subject of Clint Eastwood’s upcoming “Bird.”) Among the participants are Parker’s two wives, remarkable women both, but they remain unidentified like everyone else, including Dizzy Gillespie (the only interviewee likely to be recognized by most audiences). This easily corrected lack of identification seriously mars an otherwise elegant and valuable film.

June 30: “The House of Bernarda Alba” (Spain, 1 and 7 p.m.) and “La Senyora” (Spain, 3:30 and 9 p.m.). Mario Camus, the maker of that masterpiece of outrageous irony, “The Holy Innocents,” sets his sharply socially critical--and darkly amusing--sites on Garcia Lorca’s classic play. The result is another perfect match between film maker and material as Camus brings alive the suffocating existence of five bored, sex-starved daughters of the tyrannical, ravingly puritannical, recently widowed Bernarda Alba (Irene Gutierrez Caba) who runs her vast manor as if it were the severest of nunneries and proclaims that there’s no man within a hundred miles good enough for any of her daughters. However, in Camus’ compassionate view, Bernarda is just as much a victim of a feudal, male-dominated culture as are her miserable daughters. Camus manages to generate an atmosphere of intense repression and claustrophobia yet never does this brilliantly acted drama ever seeem like a filmed play.

With “La Senyora” film maker Jordi Cadena has made a similarly bravura adaptation in bringing a novel by Antoni Mus to the screen. In a virtuoso performance Silvia Tortosa (who also helped Cadena adapt the novel) spans more than 20 years in the life of a woman married off to a rich older man whose sexual eccentricities frustrate and eventually cripple her emotionally. This bleakly ironic parable of the interplay between power and sex is beautifully and daringly sustained. Cadena teeters right on the edge of Barbara Cartland territory only to end up invoking the memory of Bunuel.

From June 28-30 Euro Fest will present in the Mark Goodson Theater on the AFI campus several TV productions in video format:

June 28: “The Discoveries of a Modern Couple” (France, 6:30 p.m.) and “Barbie: A Second Life” (France) & “Pina Bausch: One Day Pina Asked . . . “ (France, 8:45 p.m.). Written by Jean-Claude Carriere (who wrote many of Bunuel’s later films) and directed by Pierre Boutron, the first stars Delphine Seyrig and Jean Carmet as an average middle-age couple who experience a literally fantastic social awakening. The second is Daniel Leconte’s documentary for on convicted Gestapo torturer Klaus Barbie’s years in Bolivian exile. The third is Chantal Akerman’s documentary on the noted choreographer and performance artist.

June 29: “Yesterday” (Denmark) & “The Green River” (France, 6:30 p.m.) and “The Bomb” (West Germany, 8:45 p.m.). The first two are documentaries. The first is Sten Baadsgaard’s study of a paralyzed man learning to communicate via a computer; the second, a report on the risky and treacherous existence of emerald dealers along the Minero River in Colombia by Jean Bertolino; and the third film, written and directed by Helmut Christian Gorlitz from a novel by Lars Molin, is a political thriller about a bomb alert.

June 30: “Barbie” and “Pina Bausch” will be repeated at 6:30 and “The Discoveries of a Modern Couple” at 8:45.

For more information about Euro Fest: (213) 520-2000.