The Future’s Bright in ‘Century’

Ildiko Enyedi’s “My 20th Century” opens with wildly promising imagery. The year is 1880, and the movie’s first scene captures the unveiling of Thomas Edison’s electric light in an elaborate ceremony in Menlo Park, N.J.

Hundreds of strung bulbs flicker as the crowd gasps. Then a marching band, outfitted in lit helmets bizarrely trailing extension cords, tramps past. The Technology Age is here, the future is upon us, anything is possible.

That thought anchors Enyedi’s difficult, original and quirky 1989 film, the Hungarian director’s first full-length release. “My 20h Century,” screening Friday night as part of UC Irvine’s “Off the Beaten Path” series, successfully evaluates and documents a time when the horizon was being extended almost daily, leaving people and ideas in wonderful flux.

At the center of this turmoil are Dora and Lili (both played by Dorotha Segda), twins separated as youngsters, now on very different paths in Budapest. Dora is a glittering seductress, using men for both fun and profit. Lili is plain-dressed and serious, a revolutionary willing to die for an obscure political cause.

We first meet them just moments after that evocative opening passage (Enyedi jumps from America to Europe, from scene to scene, in a quicksilver, often arbitrary fashion) as girls selling matches on a snowy street corner. An elliptical, poetic mood is created as Enyedi shifts from Edison’s twinkling lights to the sky’s twinkling stars, then back to Lili and Dora, almost swallowed by a flurry of snowflakes.

Out of this beauty appear two old men, who creep up to the sleeping twins, now asleep on the corner. They flip a coin, make their choices and walk off, girls in tow, in different directions. We can only guess what that means or what happens to Lili and Dora in their next few years. It’s part of the picture’s charm to be ambiguous, non-literal.

Coincidence, the big kind that often brings twins together in the movies, later places Dora and Lili on the Orient Express. Now fully grown, we see what a contrast they are. Dora is sizing up a couple of men, easy targets to be sure, while Lili worries about the bomb she’s carrying. They never meet and don’t until near the movie’s end.

Until then, we see some of the day-to-day of their lives, all against a backdrop of changing times. The miracle of Edison is in the air, as is the new thrill of motion pictures. Beyond that, the suffragettes are speaking out, demanding a reinvention of women’s roles. Lili and Dora become Enyedi’s symbols of that, especially where sexuality is concerned.

Before “My 20th Century,” Enyedi made highly experimental short films and her interest in the abstract clearly marks this one. Sometimes that seems indulgent, as in a self-conscious passage where a zoo ape talks mournfully to the camera about how he was caught, but other times it brings a layer of artfulness that can be fascinating.

It’s also satisfying for film fans to see how reverential and referential Enyedi is when it comes to the medium. Several scenes echo the great melodramatic silent films, especially the work of D.W. Griffith, and the finale even borrows from Orson Welles’ famous hall-of-mirrors episode in “The Lady From Shanghai.”

What: Ildiko Enyedi’s “My 20th Century.”

When: Friday, April 29, 7 and 9 p.m.

Where: UC Irvine’s Student Center Crystal Cove Auditorium.

Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (405) Freeway to Jamboree Road and head south to Campus Drive and take a left. Turn right on Bridge Road and take it into the campus.

Wherewithal: $2 to $4.

Where to call: (714) 856-6379.