SPECIAL SCREENINGS : UCLA’s ‘CineMythology’ Looks at Aspects of Love

The UCLA Film Archive has added three notable films, all dealing with aspects of love, to its impressive and comprehensive “CineMythology: A Retrospective of Greek Film,” now in its final week at the university’s Melnitz Theater. The 7:30 p.m. Tuesday screening of Giorgos Panoussopoulos’ “A Foolish Love” (1981), which was unavailable for preview, will be followed at approximately 9:45 p.m. with Nikos Panayotopoulos’ original and intriguing 1988 “The Woman Who Dreamed.”

One morning, a woman (Myrto Paraschi) awakens to tell her husband (Yannis Bezos) about her dream, which she describes as concluding with a prophetic image of themselves turned upside down. It will be the first of an avalanche of such accounts, driving her husband, a lawyer, to distraction just as he’s in the midst of defending an uncooperative murder suspect. Paraschi’s Anna and Bezos’ Achilles are a great-looking couple in their 30s who live in style in the countryside outside Athens.

Achilles may strike us as a bit self-important and Anna as a woman with too much time on her hands. Setting a blithe and witty tone, Panayotopoulos, however, is happily not critiquing yuppie behavior or mentality but instead has something more classic in mind--a timeless commentary on the eternal difficulties of being in love and the need for the emotional Anna and the logical Achilles to learn to accommodate each other. “The Woman Who Dreamed “ has such humor and ingenuity, it recalls the charm of the ‘30s screwball comedies.

On Wednesday, the Archive has scheduled a Yorgos Tsemberopoulos double feature, the 1990 “Take Care” (at 7:30 p.m.) and the 1984 “Sudden Love” (at approximately 9:15 p.m.). Both are exceptionally intimate and sensitive contemporary love stories that are also acute character studies. In the first, the filmmaker reveals the impact of a handsome young man (Alkis Kourkoulas) upon a middle-class Athens family, a middle-aged butcher, his wife and their three grown children. He has come from his native island with few credentials beyond his looks and determination, and he’s not above seducing women in order to get ahead.

“Take Care” is highly effective because Tsemberopoulos is prepared to view him in the round rather than to judge him. Although exploitative and callous in his relations with others, women in particular, he’s not an evil or even lazy individual. Through him and the family in which he insinuates himself we see a society very like our own: The butcher feels he must expand his business in order to compete, his youngest son scorns what he regards as his father’s shopkeeper mentality, yet he lives aimlessly, unable or unwilling to support himself.

“Sudden Love,” which was shown in a Greek series at the Nuart in January, 1986, deals with the differences in attitudes of men and women in love. It is an elegant, highly personal romantic drama involving a man (A. Theodoracopoulous) and woman (Betty Livanou, especially impressive) in their 30s, married to others but who rendezvous in Lisbon.

Information: (213) 466-FILM.