Uncovering a Lost Decade of Iranian Cinema

In the years since the downfall of the shah, post-revolutionary Iranian films have been almost entirely unavailable. But that seems to be changing.

Only last week, Darioush Mehrjui’s lively social satire “The Tenants” opened a two-week run at the Monica 4-Plex, and now the UCLA Film Archive presents the comprehensive “A Decade of Iranian Cinema,” which commences Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at Melnitz Theater and runs through April 11. A sampling of the first weekend’s offerings is quite encouraging, for the films previewed are as varied as they are fresh and exhilarating--and not at all doctrinaire.

The opening-night program is especially strong. Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s “The Peddler” (1986) takes its title from the the final vignette in this dynamic, earthy, three-part film, which in its concerns and gritty style resembles the films of Italian Neo-Realism. Part I in fact is a pitch-dark satire in the manner of the most macabre of Italian filmmakers, Marco Ferreri, and concerns a couple living in a Tehran shantytown who have four severely crippled children, and not realizing that their new baby is most likely normal, struggle mightily to avoid keeping it.

Even more bizarre is the second episode, which plays like a baroque homage to “Psycho” with its weird mother-and-son relationship. The third part deals with the paranoia a petty crook experiences in regard to a ring of smugglers. As in “Salaam Bombay!,” you can all but smell the stench of noisy, congested street life; the director’s images are dense and heady, and his exuberance overwhelms.

Sa’id Ebrahimfar’s “Nar ‘O Nay” (1988), the second feature, is a poetic masterpiece with the visual power of a Sergei Paradjanov film. A young photographer (Jahangir Almasi) takes an elderly man who has collapsed in the street to a hospital. He pores over the man’s diary and, in flashbacks, assumes the man’s identity in an exquisite evocation of the now all-but-vanished leisurely and beautiful way of life of old Persia. The film is not at all nostalgic but rather permeated by an overwhelming sense of loss.

Rakhshan Bani’etemad is one of Iran’s three women feature film directors, and her comedy “Off the Limit” (1987), which screens Sunday at 7:30 p.m., brings to mind West German director Doris Dorrie’s “Men . . .” in its amused view of masculine foibles. Mehdi Hashemi, who is handsome yet can be hilarious in the manner of Steve Martin, stars as a pompous civil servant struggling to get an easygoing thief arrested only to discover that the shabby old house he saved up 15 years to buy is outside the jurisdiction of the Tehran police. The film demolishes the nightmares of bureaucracy; wisely, the director has set her story in 1972.

Information: (213) 206-8013, (213) 206-FILM.

The Little Tokyo Cinemas will present, starting Friday, the most complete retrospective of the films of Akira Kurosawa possible to coincide with his receiving an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. (See related story, Page F1.)

The opening-weekend films are “Horse” (1941), a beautiful, stirring drama of peasant life on which Kurosawa served as its dynamic second-unit director; “Sanshiro Sugata” (1943) and “Sanshiro Sugata, Part 2” (1945), a charming, wistful account of the spiritual growth of a judo pupil and his subsequent defense of his championship; “The Most Beautiful” (1944), a tribute to the extreme sacrifices of ordinary Japanese people during World War II and starring vivacious Yoko Yaguchi, who retired from the screen to become Mrs. Kurosawa, and “The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tale” (1945), a sly parody on an old Kabuki drama in which Kurosawa subtly managed to uphold humanist values in the midst of war. Schedule and showtimes: (213) 687-8665.