‘Merry-Go-Round’ Next in Tchalgadjieff Series

The UCLA Film Archives series “Produced by Stephane Tchalgadjieff” continues tonight at 7:30 in Melnitz Theater with another of Jacques Rivette’s elegant puzzles, “Merry-Go-Round” (1979), starring Maria Schneider and Joe Dallesandro.

A woman issues an urgent summons to her lover (Dallesandro) in New York and to her sister (Schneider) in Rome to meet at a hotel somewhere outside Paris. From this point on the two are led on a droll and ever-perplexing chase. Has the sister been kidnaped or is she ensnaring Dallesandro and Schneider in some elaborate plot? We never know for sure, but it does seem that a $4-million cache is at stake. With its intimations of conspiracy, “Merry-Go-Round” is one of Rivette’s characteristic evocations of paranoia, complete with fantasy sequences; one involves Dallesandro battling a knight in shining armor.

If “Merry-Go-Round” is not as serious or political as many other Rivette films, it also has less meaning than they possess. Even so, this is one of his most beautiful films, and Rivette’s spontaneity, restless drive and acute sense of the visual never flag, although your attention may, considering the film’s 160-minute running time. “Merry-Go-Round,” which has got to be one of the cinema’s longest shaggy-dog stories, is bilingual, as much in English as it is in French; unfortunately, the film is apparently available only in a French-subtitled version.

Playing with “Merry-Go-Round” is a 1977 film of “Aida,” staged at the Theatre Antique in Orange, France, and directed by Pierre Jourdan. Gilda Cruz-Romo and Grace Bumbry are featured, and Thomas Schippers conducted. (213) 206-FILM, 206-8013.

“Ingrid Bergman: An Early Retrospective” also continues at UCLA with a Saturday double feature in Melnitz Theater at 7:30 p.m. “A Woman’s Face” (1938) and “June Night” (1940) are both durably entertaining and attest to Bergman’s ability to find truthfulness in the most melodramatic material, a gift that was to serve her well throughout her long and highly varied career.

Based on a French play by Francois de Croisset, “A Woman’s Face” was remade by MGM under the same title in 1941, with George Cukor directing Joan Crawford in one of her best performances. Our first glimpse of Bergman finds her with her back to us, looking in a mirror at her face, hideously scarred by a burn. It is a real jolt, considering Bergman’s fabled natural beauty, and one the actress sustains in a relentless portrayal of a woman so self-hating and despairing that she is thoroughly convincing as the most ruthless of blackmailers.

By the time Crawford tackled the disfigured and hardened Anna Holm, she was a 37-year-old superstar with 16 years in films; in 1938 Bergman was a 23-year-old with only three starring roles to her credit. In any event, “A Woman’s Face” is sure-fire material, with Anna discovering how hard it is to remain evil once she has had her beauty restored by plastic surgery. Bergman was as well-directed by the distinguished Gustaf Molander as Crawford was by Cukor (who in turn was to direct Bergman to her first Oscar in the 1944 “Gaslight”).

Directed by Per Lindberg, “June Night” is a luminously lovely-looking, highly romantic film with Bergman cast as a lonely small-town girl who suffers a near-fatal shooting at the hands of a discarded lover (Gunnar Sjoberg), a seaman who had intended to shoot himself. (The seaman is supposed to be oafish, yet he says achingly of his lover that she “was like a long voyage to distant ports.”) Bergman is then nearly done in all over again by the scandal surrounding the shooting, which follows her even to her new life in Stockholm.

As in “A Woman’s Face,” Bergman becomes involved with the surgeon who performs miracles upon her; in both films, gleaming, chrome-fitted Art Deco operating rooms speak volumes of the faith the public had in modern medicine in the ‘30s. If “June Night” seems dated because its shooting would scarcely create such a stir today, it is nevertheless frank about love outside marriage in a way not possible in Hollywood in the ‘30s. Two more Bergmans, both directed by Gustaf Molander, screen on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. They are “Dollar” (1938) and “Only One Night” (1939).