Director Continues His Winning Way With Losers : Movies: Italian Gabriele Salvatores, an Oscar winner for ‘Mediterraneo,’ enjoys tales of small-town victims and dreamers.

Director Gabriele Salvatores is an Oscar winner with an irrepressible affection for losers.

They keep popping up in his films--from the non-fighting, lost soldiers who gradually integrate into Greek island life in “Mediterraneo,” which won the best foreign language film Oscar this year, to defrauded friends in his earlier “Marrakech Express” and the culture-shocked yuppie of his next film, “Puerto Escondido.”

Although he has received barbs for showing the world Italians who don’t want to fight, who choose sex and good food over patriotism, Salvatores continues to capitalize on his winning streak with losers.

“I have them in my films because they’re friends,” he says matter-of-factly. “That’s the problem, I feel great affection for losers. The soldiers in ‘Mediterraneo’ aren’t real soldiers; they’re peasants and shepherds in uniform with guns they don’t know how to use--and they’re lost.”

It is hard to associate the tall, bespectacled 41-year-old Salvatores, who is so concerned about life’s victims and dreamers, with the razzmatazz of box-office success. In the year it was shown in Italy before it won the Oscar, “Mediterraneo” brought in about 5 billion lire (roughly $4 million), good money for an Italian movie in Italy. In the two months after the award, that figure has doubled. And in this country, the movie had earned $2.2 million going into the weekend, playing in 81 theaters, according to Miramax Films, the film’s U.S. distributor. Its grosses have increased in Los Angeles, remain steady in New York and the film is continuing to open around the country.

There’s assurance and realism, however, under Salvatores’ gentle irony and somewhat bemused reaction to his success.

Naturally, the Oscar has had an effect, both on him and Italian cinema. “Obviously the Oscar has brought about changes,” he freely admits, “not least of them financial.”

Apart from the money--”which in Italy all goes to the production company,” he explains--there’s the power.

“I’m now known and freer to make the films I want, without having to argue,” he says, adding that since winning the Oscar he has received offers from Hollywood, Canada and England, although he is busy with films he is developing himself.

But Salvatores is basically a homeboy. “I can only tell stories about what I know,” he explains. Fear of losing his identity and becoming a cultural waif--like one of his film characters--by treading in alien territory keeps him, for the moment, at home.

Not least of his concerns is that his own production company, made up of friends from early theater days--from technicians to actors--has projects in the pipeline. He is currently editing “Puerto Escondido,” and has a second project ready to roll in October.

This is a busy season for Salvatores and an important time for born-again Italian cinema.

After two recent Oscars (for “Mediterraneo” and Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso” in 1989), another nominated film (“Open Doors” by Gianni Amelio) and the fact that lately more Italian films have been distributed outside the country, “Perhaps you can now talk about a slow recovery of Italian cinema,” Salvatores suggests with caution.

Only the best Italian films are shown outside of the country and few have successfully reached foreign shores in the last 20 years, he and others note. “Twenty years of total darkness . . . of barbarism,” says Salvatores, Italy’s movie crusader. “My generation of directors--we’re doing nothing extraordinary. . . . But our task now is to make an Italian public go back to the cinema to see Italian films . . . and we’re succeeding, just a little.”

(Salvatores’ “On Tour,” a 1988 comedy about two actors in love with the same actress, screens Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Directors Guild as part of the American Cinematheque’s “Italian Cinema Now Series.”)

But they haven’t forgotten their cinematic forefathers. Salvatores and his contemporaries still see Roberto Rossellini’s neo-realism, Federico Fellini’s fantasy and Vittorio De Sica’s inimitable comedies as their cinematic bibles.

Today’s sparks of inventiveness owe much to the postwar discoveries of cinema made in the streets and homes of small-town Italy. Realism and an impartial view of life have come back to the best of Italian cinema in works like Daniele Lucchetti’s too-credible portrayal of the rise and fall of an arrogant, corrupt politician in “The Footman (Il Portaborse)”--which will be shown at the AFI fest this month--or Amelio’s depiction of crime and punishment under fascism in “Open Doors.”

Salvatores turns to humor and irony within realist drama.

“I can’t seem to do things which are only dramatic or only comic,” he says. “The Greeks tied tragic and comic masks together--life is like that.”

Unrelieved tragedy is frightening--”You can’t do anything about it, it’s a chair, immobile, stuck in the middle of the room. If I start to saw the legs of the chair, perhaps I can set something in motion.”

Humor and drama will pepper his upcoming film about the yuppie bank manager from Milan forced to abscond to Mexico because he is an unwitting witness to murder by a high-level policeman. He ends up in “a sort of Casablanca,” peopled by end-of-the-line characters who live by their wits. His wits are nonexistent and his credit card is cut off. How he adapts and changes is the story of the film.

For a hometowner, Salvatores makes many films abroad, he concedes, adding: “But they’re always about Italians. They’re essentially concerned with people in alien situations above and beyond their control.”

The project he’ll make this fall, “Sud,” was filmed at home in the Italian south, and tells of a group of frustrated victims of the 1981 Naples earthquake. They still live in railway container trucks and prefab housing--a touch of real life here. At one of Italy’s myriad elections, they occupy a polling booth to protest unrelieved political corruption, find themselves with two unwanted hostages and attempt a siege armed with old hunting rifles and a wartime pistol.

They fail of course, but their story is one of a small people’s struggle for recognition, survival and true-life Italian dreams and disorganization.