MOVIE REVIEWS : Spanish Film Series at the Nuart Runs the Gamut of Passion

More than most writers, Nobel laureate and ex-movie critic Gabriel Garcia Marquez understands how love and death, sex and violence, make up the bloodstream of the cinema.

The six movies that compose “Dangerous Loves” (starting tonight at the Nuart), all conceived and co-scripted by Marquez, deal with extremes of passion, love on the borderline of chaos and the dark. At their gentlest, they portray love that tears you apart (“Letters From the Park”); at their roughest, love that drives you to the arms of murder (“I’m the One You’re Looking For”).

Marquez is no dilettante. Film is his great passion; his most famous novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” started as a patchwork of scripts rejected by producers. The six scripts here are all based on Marquez stories or novel fragments. It’s a measure of his fecundity that 10 pages or less from “Love in the Time of Cholera” provide two complete movies: Tomas Gutierrez’s Alea’s exquisite period romance “Letters From the Park” and Ruy Guerra’s ironic tragedy “Fable of the Beautiful Pigeon-Fancier.”

Each film has a touch of the fabulous--and one of them, “Miracle in Rome,” is the sort of fable Luis Bunuel might have liked--yet they’re all relatively simple. Marquez is an ideal scenarist; he lets the stories reflect his collaborators’ personality as much as his own: Guerra’s opulent sense of fate and doom, Alea’s mournful romanticism, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo’s subtle psychology, Fernando Birri’s flamboyant populism and fabulism.

All the films deal with love: difficult rather than dangerous love. In the Brazilian “Fable of the Beautiful Pigeon-Fancier” (playing Saturday and Monday), the central character, Orestes--a mama’s boy seducer with a waxed mustache and dyed hair--falls madly in love with young pigeon breeder Fulvia (Claudia Ohana, of the Guerra-Marquez “Erendira”), seducing her by carrier pigeon. Guerra shoots the film as an elegant, Wellesian comedy of fate and manners. It is Orestes’ exquisite absurdity that engages us, his preposterous dignity while tumbling trouserless out of a mistress’ window, his 18th-Century code, preserved on the brink of the 20th, the way he tries to tippy-toe over the mud and squalor and finally plunges into it.

Hermosillo’s Mexican “The Summer of Miss Forbes” (tonight and Sunday) is the only “Loves” film with an overtly gay sensibility. It gives us a Prussian governess (Hanna Schygulla of the Fassbinder films), two boys who want to kill her and a dazzlingly beautiful Aqua-Lung diver whom she engages in a demented seduction. Hermosillo likes to juxtapose the naive and the sophisticated. He keeps us by the side of the ocean, the crashing waves an endless leitmotif, the surface placid and sunny, sharks circling below. The movie is a ambivalent paean to disorder: the most repressive character, Miss Forbes, is also the most sex-crazed.

“Miracle in Rome” (tonight and Tuesday), by the Colombian director Lisandro Duque, has the series’ most striking scenario. In this satire on religious zeal, a father, crazed with grief after the death of his 7-year-old daughter, tries to have her canonized in Rome, when her body, after 12 years, shows no sign of earthly decay. Marquez’s humor here is very sly, very urbane. He carves up his pompous victims with cool sardonic glee. Yet Duque lacks the visual flair of Guerra or Birri, or the quiet, subtler control of Hermosillo and Alea.

So does Jaime Chavarri, in Spain’s “I’m the One You’re Looking For” (Sunday). It’s the least of the six, though it may be preferred by any audience that thinks Pedro Almodovar is the best living Spanish filmmaker. Like Almodovar, Marquez and Chavarri spelunk into the sexual underworld of Madrid--with a woman pursuing her own rapist through a hinterland of bars, pick-up parks and sex shows, her guardian angel being a kinky entertainer named “The Salamander.” The movie occasionally seems consciously shocking, a bad sign, But, unlike “Blue Velvet,” it never flinches.

“A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” (Monday), directed, co-written by and starring Fernando Birri from the Argentine avant-garde, is the rowdiest and most spectacularly alive of the sextet. Birri vividly shows us a shantytown by the ocean, then lets a whole ramshackle carnival community evolve when a miracle transforms the town: An old angel with detachable wings is discovered flopping around near the sea. The movie, bawdily juxtaposing sacred and profane love, eloquently illustrates a central hub of Marquez’s magical art: The angel is a fake, but he’s also real. Life is real, but it’s also fake. Even though his wings are detachable, his mission is, indeed, heavenly.

My favorite is Alea’s “Letters From the Park” (Saturday and Tuesday), based on another bit of “Cholera.” Here, the professional letter-writer who handles both sides of an epistolary amour--falling in love with the girl--is a wonderful invention. So is the callow Romeo, the witless would-be aerialist. This story could have brought the best out of Max Ophuls and it gets the best from Alea, whose “Memories of Underdevelopment”--done in a similarly pensive but far less poignant key--remains a benchmark of the Cuban cinema.

“Letters” is the sweetest and gentlest of the “Dangerous Loves” (all Times-rated Mature for sex and violence). Yet, it too has a dark core. It poses an old question: How can a man who makes his living by speaking other’s hearts finally speak his own?