Go-for-Broke Surreal Fun at Nuart’s Hong Kong Fest

The Nuart’s 14-film Festival Hong Kong, the fun series of the year, concludes tonight and Tuesday with Cory Yuen and David Lai’s avant-garde “Saviour of the Soul,” a surreal go-for-broke pastiche of all the Hong Kong genres that sometimes defies comprehension but is never less than entertaining.

The Silver Fox (Aaron Kwok), a prematurely gray-haired young swordsman, slays a legion of palace guards and winds up in a kind of “Blade Runner” future to intervene in the life of a Hong Kong “city soldier” (Andy Lau). Lau, who looks like a Calvin Klein model, seeks to avenge the death of a partner and to win the love of another (Anita Mui) through a thicket of bizarre twists and turns.

Yee Chung Mein’s elegant stylized production design gives the film something of the look of Francis Ford Coppola’s “One From the Heart.” On one level, it’s a send-up; on another, a drenchingly romantic--a la Jean-Jacques Beineix--fable of a retro-future knight whose mettle must be tested (and how!) in his pursuit of his fair lady.

Lau co-stars in the second feature, Wong Jing’s “God of the Gamblers” (1989), as one of a group of unemployed youths who come across an unconscious man (Chow Yun-Fat). The man awakens with amnesia and childlike behavior but has an incredible knack for gambling that Lau et al mean to exploit to the max.

Overly talky and not as well-directed as most Hong Kong films, “God of the Gamblers” gets better and increasingly ingenious--and even provocative--as it goes along and is sustained by a wonderfully versatile and witty performance by Chow, in a deft change of pace from his serious roles in John Woo action pictures.

Information: (310) 478-6379.

The Little Tramp: In connection with the release of Richard Attenborough’s “Chaplin,” the Silent Movie is presenting Wednesday at 8 p.m. a Charlie Chaplin Night composed of “The Gold Rush” (1925) and three shorts, “The Rounders” (1914), “Behind the Screen” (1916) and “The Immigrant” (1917). This program not only is timelessly entertaining but also reveals Chaplin’s evolution as an artist, moving his beloved Little Tramp from the knockabout slapstick of his very first year with Mack Sennett to the pathos of one of his earliest full-length masterpieces.

In “The Gold Rush” Chaplin drops the Little Tramp with his moldy cutaway, baggy pants, tiny mustache, derby and walking stick into snowy Alaska peopled with rugged sourdoughs.

Needless to say, the Tramp is gloriously, wonderfully out of place, but it’s just the environment to test the Tramp’s indomitable resilience, courage and determination to survive. The whole film is a parable of Chaplin’s own life experience: up from literal hunger to fame and unapologetic fortune, and winning the heroine--in this case Georgia Hale’s lovely, spirited dance hall girl--as well.

“The Gold Rush,” which bounces along with a bubbly spontaneity, contains a number of justly famous moments: the Tramp eating his own shoe with an elegant nonchalance; the Tramp and his massive pal (Mack Swain) scrambling around their cabin as it teeters on the edge of a cliff, driven there by a blizzard; and the Tramp’s charming “biscuit ballet,” in which Chaplin spears a pair of rolls with forks, creating with such simple means a little puppet-like dance at the dinner table.

There’s not an ounce of pathos in “The Rounders,” but it shows off Chaplin’s formidable physical dexterity in a series of pratfalls and slapstick shenanigans as he teams with Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle as a couple of good-time guys out on the town, much to the indignation of their two-fisted wives (Phyllis Allen as Chaplin’s battle-ax spouse, Minta Durfee as Arbuckle’s no-nonsense wife--his real-life wife offscreen). The bulky Arbuckle and the diminutive Chaplin were a delightful Mutt-and-Jeff team, foreshadowing Chaplin and Swain in “The Gold Rush.”

The two-reel “Behind the Screen” offers a funny slapstick version of how movies are made, with the Tramp playing the overworked assistant to a head carpenter at a Sennett-like studio.

“The Immigrant” is one of the key Chaplin films, in which he bravely makes light of the ordeal of steerage and then dares to show, always with humor, how the streets of Manhattan are far from paved with gold. Featured is the radiantly beautiful and good-natured Edna Purviance, Chaplin’s first important leading lady.

Information: (213) 653-2389.