‘Sophie’s Place’ Delightful but Demanding

Larry Jordan’s delightful, confounding and highly demanding 90-minute animated “Sophie’s Place,” which Filmforum presents tonight at 8, takes its title from Istanbul’s vast and ancient St. Sophia’s Cathedral, now a museum. Jordan states that the Greek word philosophia means to love wisdom , and the film seems to express Jordan’s pursuit of it. In production for five years, “Sophie’s Place” is a collage of brightly hued cutouts from Victorian prints, and it has the charm of an old Valentine. Yet its imagery is actually tantalizingly complex, and the film unfolds like a Dali-esque dream with continually mutating and repeated motifs of many things, in particular: butterflies; a sad, androgynous face painted on a quaint balloon, and all manner of phenomena emerging from tea cups. The entire film is said to be spontaneous, unplanned and unedited. Jordan will appear in person. Information: (213) 276-7452, (714) 923-2441.

“Carrie,” William Wyler’s 1952 film of Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie,” screens Saturday at 8 p.m. at LACMA’s Bing Theater as part of a tribute series to the late Laurence Olivier. Unjustly neglected among Wyler’s fine literary adaptations, it emerges as a sweeping, period-perfect, ill-fated romance in which Olivier’s successful middle-aged Chicago restaurateur throws his life away for Jennifer Jones’ naive but ambitious country girl. Daringly, Dreiser suggested that life in a sweatshop could be a worse fate for an unskilled young girl than being a “fallen woman.” Information: (213) 857-6010.

Among the weekend offerings in the UCLA Film Archive’s “Cinecitta: Fifty Years”) are Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1982 “Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man,” which screens Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Theater, and Giuseppe Bertolucci’s 1985 “Secrets, Secrets,” screening Sunday after the 7:30 p.m. presentation of Nanni Moretti’s “The Mass Is Over” (1985).

For its first 90 minutes, the two-hour “Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man” seems like a conventional TV movie, in which the son of a self-made Parma cheese magnate (Ugo Tognazzi) and his elegant French wife (Anouk Aimee) is kidnaped. Then, suddenly, everything falls into place, making clear that what has concerned Bernardo Bertolucci uppermost is not politics and plot but psychology and human nature.

Giuseppe Bertolucci’s superb, enigmatic “Secrets, Secrets” features seven of Italy’s most vibrant and beautiful actresses from three different generations. It is at once an observation of mother-daughter relationships and of camaraderie between very different women. Although warm and expansive in the Italian tradition, it traces the tragic domino effect of one act of political terrorism. Bertolucci does not judge the film’s terrorists or even seem at all interested in their motives, but instead presents terrorism as a fact of life in contemporary Italy.

The film’s central figure is the rich, aristocratic Laura (Lina Sastri, who resembles the young Irene Papas), who not only assassinates a judge in a deserted Venetian square, but also coolly guns down one of her own followers, perceiving him a weak link in her gang. We discover the impact of his death upon his gorgeous, devoted half-sister Rosa (Giulia Boschi) and her mother (played by an ever-radiant Rosanna Podesta, who once played Helen of Troy).

It’s hard to reconcile Laura, the cold-blooded killer, with the charming, considerate woman she is with her own mother (Lea Massari), with whom she shares a spacious flat. She is even patient with her mother’s self-absorbed friend (Stefania Sandrelli), who is recovering from a suicide attempt. Only Laura’s childhood nanny (a majestic Alida Valli) senses that Laura is not what she seems. Yet another mother-daughter combination is that of a judge (Mariangela Melato) and her small child.

Giuseppe Bertolucci, whose direction of actresses is as masterful as that of George Cukor, seems as gifted as his older brother Bernardo (with whom he wrote “1900” and “Luna”). “Secrets, Secrets” may be a commentary upon the effects of public acts upon private lives, but it is first of all a gallery of luminous portraits of women. Information: (213) 206-FILM, 206-8013.