Life Takes Disturbing Detour in ‘Seventh’

Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke’s jolting “The Seventh Continent” (11 a.m. at the Sunset 5, Saturdays and Sundays only) is arguably a great film, but not everyone will want to submit themselves to the kind of film that lodges so disturbingly in the memory. Haneke introduces us to an affluent, upwardly mobile Viennese couple (Dieter Berner, Birgit Doll) with a small daughter (Leni Tanzer) in tight, close-cropped images, catching us up in their daily routines and gradually pulling back to involve us in their lives. Haneke then takes a tack that seems from way out of left field and is all but unbearable to watch. Upon reflection, however, we realize that the film has proceeded with a terrible logic. Based on an actual incident, “The Seventh Continent” eschews conventional exposition in asking us to consider the systematic withering of the soul in our starkly impersonal modern existence.

By contrast, Lodge Kerrigan’s bleak, terse 80-minute “Clean, Shaven” (Friday at the Sunset 5 for week) may be too elliptical for its own good.

It does a terrific job of getting us inside the head of a young man (impressive Peter Greene of “Laws of Gravity” and “The Big Bang Theory”) who’s disintegrating mentally as he tries to locate his small daughter (Jennifer MacDonald).

But we are left to guess whether quick flashbacks of violent acts are memories or his fantasies--or someone else’s memories. “Clean, Shaven” is finally too conventional to sustain the rigorous austerity of its style, which perversely undercuts rather than heightens its impact. Information: (213) 848-3500.

*

The Horror Remembered: “Revealing Russia: Five Films by Marina Goldovskaya,” a series of documentaries on life in Russia, will begin this weekend at the Sunset 5 at 11 a.m. Saturdays and Sundays only with “Solovky Power” (1988). This bleakly beautiful 87-minute film, which screens this weekend only, takes us to a remote island in the White Sea, spectacular site of the magnificent 15th-Century Solovki monastery that in 1923 became the first Soviet prison camp--and the model for all the gulags to follow. Goldovskaya, now a UCLA cinema professor, was able to extract extraordinary footage from a documentary on Solovki made in the late ‘20s and combine it with the reminiscences of former prisoners, now in their 80s or 90s.

“We shall drive mankind to happiness with an iron hand,” the Leninist slogan from a 1918 poster with which Goldovskaya opens her film, has an absurdity that matches the survivors’ accounts of the pointless horrors to which they were subjected, having been sent to Solovki often on the flimsiest of pretexts and for endless years of toil, mainly in logging operations in the nearby forests. Writer Oleg Volkov, now a white-bearded patriarch, speaks calmly of how his three-year sentence was stretched to 27; another man tells of witnessing the massacre of 316 people, shot merely as a warning to other prisoners.

Information: (310) 394-9741.

*

Five by Kang: The Morning Calm Theater, 14948 S. Crenshaw Blvd., Gardena, will present five films directed by Woo-Suk Kang, starting Friday with “Who Saw the Dragon’s Claw?” (1990). “Two Cops” (1990), the serious comedy that proved a crossover hit for Kang, will play April 28-May 4. “Mr. Mamma” (1992), a comedy about a male chauvinist, and “Happiness Is Not a Report Card” (1989), about a victim of Korea’s rigid education system, screen May 5-7 and May 8-14, respectively; neither has subtitles. “How to Top My Wife,” Kang’s recent marital comedy, another crossover success, plays May 15-18.

“Who Saw the Dragon’s Claw?” has such terrible pidgin-English subtitles that it can’t be judged fairly, yet suggests that Kang has come a long way in a short time to emerge as the highly skilled storyteller of universal appeal he is today. This is a convoluted, hard-to-follow 96-minute political thriller in which a TV anchorwoman (Sung-Ryung Kim) witnesses the assassination of a presidential candidate only moments after trysting with another presidential candidate (Keun-Hyung Park). The politico’s death is proclaimed a suicide, but Kim’s then dogged colleague (Sung-Ki An) starts digging, plunging both into danger. One suspects that there are implications of political corruption lost in translation.

Information: (310) 217-0505.