Inept Crooks Spark ‘Troublemaker’ Comedy

The sixth American Film Institute European Community Film Festival continues tonight at 7 at the Fine Arts in Beverly Hills with Luxembourg writer-director Andy Bausch’s amiably rambling, wry comedy “Troublemaker,” which features two of the most inept crooks you’ll ever see.

Johnny Chicago (Thierry Vanwerveke) and Chuck Moreno (Ender Frings) are a pair of youngish, sloppy, totally irresponsible guys who are constantly in and out of jail but are oddly likable. They and the film are slyly ingratiating, and Bausch comes up with a finish that’s as totally unexpected as it is exactly right.

Jose Fonseca e Costa’s “Your Neighbor’s Wife,” which follows “Troublemaker” at 9 p.m., reveals that there is a film maker in Portugal keeping alive the spirit of Douglas Sirk, now that R. W. Fassbinder is gone.

Like Fassbinder, Fonseca e Costa elicits genuine emotion from the most schematic irony imaginable. The film is also a tribute to its durably elegant stars, Carmen Dolores and Vergilio Texeira, cast as former lovers to whom fate has seemingly given a second chance. (For flashbacks, Fonseca e Costa uses clips from a Dolores-Texeira film of some 40 years ago.) Fernanda Torres adds a lively note as Dolores’ thoroughly uninhibited daughter.

One of the delights of the festival, Jean-Charles Tacchella’s “Travelling Avant” (Tuesday at 7 p.m.), recalls the postwar generation of Parisian film buffs from which the New Wave was eventually to emerge in the ‘50s. His young people, all of them desperately poor, flock to the Cinematheque Francaise, eat and sleep movies, especially American pictures, and dream of launching their own modest film society in an old suburban movie house.

Belgium’s Andre Delvaux brings rich imagery and a sense of immediacy to “The Abyss” (Tuesday at 9:10 p.m.), his film of Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel about a free-thinking, truth-seeking, 16th-Century physician-alchemist. He returns home, under an alias, to Bruges after a 30-year absence, arriving as the conquering Spanish are conducting an inquisition. That the hero is played by Italy’s masterful Gian Maria Volonte, a definitive screen rebel/political activist, unfortunately helps make the physician’s fate seem predictable rather than inevitable.

Major disappointment: Margarethe von Trotta’s leaden adaptation of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (Thursday at 7 p.m.). Not even the vibrant Fanny Ardant, Greta Scacchi and Valeria Golino can make a difference.

EuroFest, however, ends on a happy note with composer Michel Legrand’s enchanting debut film “Five Days in June” (Thursday at 9 p.m.), involving his own coming of age, which took place under the most exciting circumstances. His 14-year-old Michel (Mathieu Roze), a gifted pianist, picks up a Paris Conservatoire prize the very day the Allies land in Normandy. Michel and his mother (Annie Girardot) join forces with a beautiful free spirit, a young woman with just a touch of mystery (Sabine Azema, a dazzler memorable from “A Sunday in the Country”) as they are forced to bicycle the long distance home, facing along the way the perils of the retreating German Army of Occupation.

For full schedule: (213) 856-7707, 652-1330.

The New Beverly Cinema will present the 15-chapter 1943 “Batman” in three parts on the next three Saturdays at midnight, and will repeat the serial if it proves popular. It may well do so, for this “Batman” proved to be great fun when it was presented in a five-hour marathon at the old Cinema Theater. It has an innocence not possible in the 1966 film or in the current blockbuster, and it has a wonderful pictorial quality, thanks to its director, silent-era pioneer Lambert Hillyer. Leslie Wilson stars, Douglas Croft is Robin, and J. Carrol Naish is the glorious villain, determined to steal our radium supply for the Nazis. Information: (213) 938-4038.