FILM REVIEWS : Latin Visions Sordid and Serious at UCLA

Two of the four UCLA student films on view tonight in Melnitz Hall go on location south of the border to visit sensual and/or seedy climes in Latin America--the first and last thing they have in common.

One, Claude Budin’s “Farewell to the Flesh,” is a tame documentary look at Rio de Janeiro’s annual carnival that may be too clinical for its own good. But the other, George Cunningham’s outrageously comic “Animal Attraction,” is a fictional trip to Tijuana that revels in all-out irreverence--and it’s a real crack-up.

Those who fret that tastelessness in the service of cultural satire has been abandoned by today’s careful college students will be heartened by “Animal Attraction,” which dares to skirt the boundaries of sexism, ethnocentrism and almost every other potentially offensive ism that the National Lampoon generation once held dear. Cunningham takes brave digs at some less-than-easy targets, and may be a real comedy find; Michael O’Donoghue would be proud.

It’s a pseudo-TV documentary about a search for a mythical Tijuana nightclub called Casa de Hee Haw, where bored American tourists supposedly flock to see a live little-theater sex show involving a local lass and a donkey. Warning: If you think you might be offended, you probably will be.

Mexicans are allowed little mercy from Cunningham’s satirical knife (and it wouldn’t be surprising if one of UCLA’s active Latino groups raised a ruckus), but his real targets are the gringos whose curiosity keeps the border city’s more sordid enterprises in business. Even the on-screen TV newsman is hopelessly, and hilariously, patronizing to Tijuana’s impoverished locals, as when he casually bends down to offer money to a woman on the street for her infant’s toy. This “Attraction” is surely not for everyone, but it does have teeth.

Budin’s “Farewell to the Flesh” is an intriguing if (at 30 minutes) overlong travelogue of Rio’s carnival, which is seen to resemble nothing so much as an annual populist version of Vegas glitz, but with better music. A game anthropology professor provides insightful narration, but the film is hampered by Budin’s lack of real contact with the almost Fellini-like passing parade, as if the revelers were exotic fish and his lens a glass-bottom boat.

The other two efforts on view are marginal: Lisa Patten’s “The Danger of Doing Dishes,” about a young woman trying to exercise her “feminine intuition,” has some good, comic lines, but feels anecdotal and underdeveloped. And Kevin Proulx’s “Dark Harvest” is nothing more than an eight-minute coming attraction trailer for a Corman-style sci-fi feature he’d like to get produced.

The four shorts play twice tonight, at 8 and again at 9:30, in Melnitz Hall. Admission is free.

Reservations: (213) 559-0406.