AFI Offers a Rare Look at Latin American Films

The AFI FilmFest’s Americas Film Festival, composed of 18 films, begins a one-week run Friday at the Monica 4-Plex with Busi Cortes’ “Snakes and Ladders.” Screenings are at 6:45 and 9 p.m. and Monday at 9 p.m. This is the first of four films previewed, all of which are outstanding and attest to the vitality of the cinema of Latin America, which undeservedly remains largely unknown in the United States.

Cortes takes us into the formal world of upper-crust Guanajuato in the ‘50s, where two young women, childhood friends (who once played the game that gives the film its curious title) are coming of age in an oppressive male-dominated society. Cortes reveals a delicately nuanced feminine sensibility in describing the lives of several woman while coolly skewering machismo and the double standard.

Arcelia Ramirez stars as Valentina, the daughter of a handsome, womanizing politician (Hector Bonilla) and his beautiful, long-suffering wife (Diana Bracho), and Lumi Cavazos is Rebecca, her dangerously naive friend.

Peruvian filmmaker Danny Gavidia makes a dazzling feature debut with his “Tale of Death” (Saturday at 4:15 and 9 p.m.; Tuesday at 8:45 p.m.), a tense, dynamic prison hostage drama that also effectively blasts the role of TV in exploiting and thereby exacerbating such crises. Marisol Palacios stars as Anel, a TV reporter assigned by her ratings-conscious boss to cover a prison riot where a group of official visitors, including the Venezuelan ambassador, have barred themselves in a cell. Meanwhile, the situation is intensified by gang rivalry among the inmates.

Gavidia brings a crackling, shoot-from-the-hip immediacy to Jose Watanabe’s script that honestly conveys how reporters can be turned on by covering a volatile standoff and thus become a part of the story instead of merely reporting on it; indeed, Anel’s new cameraman Alfredo (Diego Bertie) is caught up in the danger and excitement of the situation.

Marilyn Monroe, Jean Harlow and all the other gorgeous ill-fated movie stars have never received anything as sensitive and caring in the treatment of their story on film as has Miroslava, the beautiful Mexican actress who became internationally renowned in the ‘50s. What director Alejandro Pelayo and his writers have done is to take the cliches of the standard movie- star screen biography--the lonely beauty misused by men, cursed by fate, adored for her looks rather than her talent--and treated them with the utmost tenderness and seriousness.

“Miroslava” (Sunday at 4:15 and 9 p.m.; Monday at 7 p.m.) is as romantic and loving as its heroine, played with subtly, grace and understanding by France’s ravishing Arielle Dombasle, the star of Eric Rohmer’s “Pauline at the Beach,” and who, incidentally, spent the first 18 years of her life in Mexico.

Narrated with tenderness by veteran actor Claudio Brook, “Miroslava” commences with the pill overdose death of Miroslava at 25 in 1955. A World War II emigre from Czechoslovakia, Miroslava (who dropped her last name, Stern) experienced as much dizzying professional success as failure in her private life--if memory serves, she even made the cover of Life magazine.

Quickly established in Mexican movies, she was teamed with such major stars as Brook, with whom she appeared in the first and last of her 26 movies, Arturo De Cordova and Cantinflas; Bunuel asked for her to be in what proved to be her final film, “The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de La Cruz.” She had terrible luck with men, culminating in a disastrous romance with Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguin, easily as famous for his conquests of such stars as Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth as for his skill as a matador.

Andre Klotzel’s “Savage Capitalism” (Sunday at 6:30 and 8:45 p.m.; Monday at 8:45 p.m.) hilariously combines a wry social consciousness with a spoof of Brazil’s much-loved nighttime soap operas, the telenovelas.

A fledgling reporter (Fernanda Torres, who recalls Julie Kavner) interviews a handsome mining company executive (Jose Mayer) given to mysterious fits--and who has an even more mysterious parentage--only to fall madly in love with him. Just then his avaricious wife (Maria Orth), believed to have been killed in a plane crash, turns up and joins forces with her husband’s equally avaricious half-brother (Marcelo Tass) to try to rob a tribe of Brazilian Indians of their gold resources. Klotzel’s inspired outrageousness never flags for an instant.

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