MOVIE REVIEWS / L.A. FESTIVAL : Foreign Classics Highlight Weekend

Following are reviews of selected screenings in the Los Angeles Festival’s final weekend:

Mary, My Dearest

Mexico Sunday at 4 p.m. at Melnitz Theater, UCLA In America these days, we don’t bother much soliciting screenplays from people like Norman Mailer or Saul Bellow because it’s taken for granted that they can’t write as well as Shane Black or Cash and Epps. In Latin America, apparently they don’t suffer from similar prejudices: Colombian Nobel Prize winner (and ex-movie critic) Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a prolific screenwriter, and probably the best in the region. This film, directed by Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, is a masterpiece of romance, irony and tension--sliding from idyllic erotic fantasy to Kafkaesque comedy with breathtaking facility. A female magician hooks up with a burglar and magically changes his life; then, after her van breaks down on the highway, she tumbles into the callous, crazy bureaucracy of a grotesque, but infernally believable, lunatic asylum. Hermosillo, who has directed Garcia Marquez scripts twice, isn’t quite as smooth as he is with his own writing--but this is one terrific story. It’s also a good example of the virtues of employing a writer to write screenplays.