‘Bingo, Bridesmaids’ in Australian Festival

“Back of Beyond: Discovering Australian Film and Television” will open with the U.S. premiere at 8 tonight of Mark Joffe’s “Grievous Bodily Harm,” a thriller involving a porn-addicted serial killer. (It was unavailable for preview).

The festival, presented by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Australian Film Commission, runs through Nov. 20 in UCLA’s Melnitz Theater. It will continue at 7:30 p.m. Friday with Gillian Armstrong’s enjoyable “Bingo, Bridesmaids and Braces,” which immediately draws comparison with Michael Apted’s far more incisive “28-Up” with its study of a cross-section of 14 British young people whom we meet at the ages of 7, 14, 21 and 28.

Armstrong has restricted herself not only to three extremely similar young women, whom we meet at the ages of 14, 18 and 26, but also to a narrow range of inquiry, limited primarily to how they feel about themselves and their families. They are all working-class, Caucasian, attractive, likable, extremely well-spoken and articulate. We have scarcely a clue how they feel about Australian society, its opportunities and its limitations, or the world at large. There’s nothing condescending in Armstrong’s film, yet you come away with the impression that these three women possess no true individuality.

Sarah Gibson and Susan Lambert’s “Landslides” (1986), which screens Sunday at 1 p.m., is a 75-minute experimental film that attempts to connect exploration of outer space with that of inner space--the human body. Gibson and Lambert, who have been collaborating since 1971, are onto something with such juxtapositions as the surface of the moon and the layers of flesh exposed in operations, just as, in another context, they are able to give the bathing of a baby cosmic implications, but they allow their film to become overlong and finally pretentious. Better bet: the Kennedy-Miller video retrospective (at 3 p.m.) and tribute (at 7:30 p.m.), saluting Australia’s most successful film and TV production company, headed by “Mad Max’s” George Miller.