Filmmaker Luna to Speak at ‘Recent Spanish Cinema’

The American Cinematheque’s ambitious six-day “Recent Spanish Cinema,” featuring a tribute to iconoclastic filmmaker Bigas Luna, commences tonight at 8 p.m. at the Directors Guild, 7920 Sunset Blvd., with a screening of Luna’s latest, “The Tit and the Moon.” The tender fable of love and passion, while lusty, marks a departure from Luna’s usual all-out raunchiness. Luna will discuss the film following the screening.

A boy (Biel Duran), living in a Catalan village and verging on adolescence, becomes jealous watching his mother nurse his baby brother and asks the moon for a breast to suckle. He believes his wish has been answered with the arrival of an exquisite ballerina (Mathilde May) whose traveling show includes her French husband (Gerard Darmon), a modern-day “Le Petomane.” But how is he, a mere boy, to vie for her formidable charms when his older pal (Miguel Poveda), who’s maybe 18 and a fabulous flamenco singer, falls equally hard for her. And what of the husband she adores? Never has Luna been so graceful, so wise and witty, in the telling of this enchanting tale.

Imanol Uribe’s romantic and compelling “Numbered Days,” which screens Thursday at 7 p.m. with a Q & A with Uribe to follow, offers a vivid contrast to his last film, “The Dumbfounded King,” the sliest of satires in which a 17th-Century monarch’s request to his see queen naked precipitates a scandal. This new film turns upon a chance encounter between a lush-looking 18-year-old (Ruth Gabriel), drifting in a world of drugs and prostitution, and a rugged Basque terrorist (Carmelo Gomez); Uribe’s ability to involve us in the fates of these lovers is impressive.

Both Carmen Maura and the late Fernando Rey are shown to advantage in, respectively, Enrique Urbizu’s “How to Be Miserable and Enjoy It” (Friday at 7 p.m.) and Jaime de Aminan’s “The Other Side of the Tunnel.” Although the Urbizu film sounds like an Almodovar title, it is a warm, highly effective star vehicle in which Maura plays the cultural affairs editor of a Madrid newspaper who finds herself abruptly widowed. The role makes no heavy demands upon Maura, cast as an attractive, earthy woman of 40 and strong personality. Although a tad too ruminative, “The Other Side of the Tunnel” offers a farewell to the cinema by a great international star that could not be more fitting. The timelessly elegant Rey plays a veteran screenwriter who takes off with his longtime, middle-aged partner (Gonzalo Vega) to a monastery to get down to work on their latest script; when the men encounter a beguiling young woman (Maribel Verdu) in a nearby town who tantalizes both of them, life begins to imitate art.

One of the most captivating films is the stylish “Red Squirrel,” whose maker Julio Medem brings some fresh riffs to the amnesia mystery plot. A moody rock star (Nancho Novo), whose life has fallen apart since his last hit four years earlier, rescues a sensual Bardot-ish young beauty (Emma Suarez) when her motorcycle crashes, only to discover she’s suffering from amnesia. Initially, the ex-rocker’s attempt to create a new identity for her as his girlfriend seems sinister, but the film blossoms gradually into a love story with a couple of twists--natch--at the finish. Like Gabriel and Gomez, Suarez and Novo are terrifically sexy, charismatic lovers.

Sensitive but profoundly somber, Arantxa Lazcano’s “The Dark Years” (Sunday at 3 p.m.) centers around the childhood of a young Basque girl coping with severe parents and even worse treatment from her teacher, a nun who tries to prohibit her from speaking Basque, even in her own home; the time is the exceedingly repressive ‘50s.

One of the hits of last year’s series, Luna’s “Golden Balls,” is back (Friday at 8:45 p.m.). It’s an outrageous and entertaining send-up of self-deluding machismo starring Javier Bardem, who was the stud in Luna’s international hit “Jamon, Jamon” (screening after “Golden Balls”). Bardem is almost comically handsome and virile, but he’s also a fine actor. For full schedule and more information: (213) 466-FILM.