Seductive ‘Love Songs’ to Open Latin American Series

The UCLA Film Archive’s “Contemporary Latin American Cinema,” a series of six recent films, reveals how dynamic Latin filmmaking can be.

Opening the series Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Theater is Carlos Diegues’ infectious “Rio’s Love Songs,” a quartet of vignettes inspired by popular songs composed by such maestros as Jorge Ben Jor, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque.

This often sexy, gorgeous-looking film is as seductive and rhythmic as a samba, with the most potent episode left to the last. With a touch of the supernatural, it tells of a young lottery ticket seller entranced by the beautiful sound of a woman’s singing emanating from a nearby picturesque old apartment house, only to discover that it belongs to an elderly married woman who believes that sexual passion in her long marriage is a thing of the past. “Rio’s Love Songs” finds the director of “Bye, Bye, Brazil” at the top of his game.

“The Silence of Neto” (Friday at 7:30 p.m.)--Guatemala’s official entry for the Oscars and the first feature film produced in that country for worldwide distribution--marks Luis Argueta’s knockout directorial debut. It’s a timeless coming-of-age saga, beautifully told and set against a shameful time, in 1954, when the United States, under pressure from a greedy United Fruit Co., ordered the CIA to topple the progressive administration of Jacobo Arbenz.

When this tender, illuminating film opens, its hero, Neto (Oscar Javier Almengor, who carries the film with ease and authority), is a pudgy, asthmatic 11-year-old smothered by his mother (Eva Tamargo Lemus) and various female relatives and largely spurned by his father (Julio Diaz). Neto, however, is tenacious and capable of opening himself up to his sheltered upper-middle-class world just at the point at which it starts to crumble.

Argueta is notably fair-minded: While he portrays Neto’s uncle (Herbert Meneses), a perpetual vagabond, as the boy’s mentor, encouraging him always to speak his mind, he shows Neto’s father to be a highly responsible, essentially decent head-of-the-family type, even though he doesn’t understand his older son as well as he might.

Drawing from a 1990 incident, Chilean filmmaker Gustavo Graef Marino brings to “Johnny 100 Pesos” (Saturday at 2 p.m.) a tart, timely political dimension in this classic hostage standoff suspense film, alternating effortlessly between the comic and the tragic. Armando Araiza has the title role as a woefully naive 17-year-old student (and part-time petty thief) who throws in his lot with a group of veteran criminals to hold up an illegal currency exchange in a downtown Santiago high-rise. The entire job is bungled from the get-go, and the secretary of the interior’s office has a vested interest in getting control of the situation so as to protect Chile’s newly refurbished image both at home and abroad.

“Gatica the Monkey,” a film centering on Jose Maria Gatica, an Argentine boxer of the late ‘40s, screens Saturday at 7:30 p.m. It was unavailable for preview; there will be a film, to be announced, screening Sunday at 2 p.m.

Chile’s Gonzalo Justiniano Zuniga’s “Amnesia” (Sunday at 7 p.m.) covers much the same ground as “Death and the Maiden” but minus the artificial theatricality of the Polanski film and plus an aura of absolute conviction. Twenty years after the overthrow of Salvador Allende, a gentle, mentally fragile middle-aged man (Julio Jung) encounters by chance the sergeant (Pedro Vicuna) who had made life hell for him, a miserable private in the military, as well as for the political prisoners held in a remote desert encampment, where their lives might be snuffed out by a mere whim.

To its maker’s credit, this stylized film is even more compelling than bleak and ever more suspenseful as it moves between past and present toward its inevitable moment of truth between these two men.

Information: (310) 206-FILM.

Vampire Scene: “The Girl With the Hungry Eyes,” an arty, pretentious vampire movie notable only for its use of Miami’s Art Deco district as a background, begins this week at Friday and Saturday midnight run at the Sunset 5.

Information: (310) 848-3500.