Trying a New ‘Mexperiment’

We’ve had so many film series and festivals lately--Korean cinema, Oscar surveys, gay videos, animation movies, Chaplin, Capra and Hitchcock tributes, Audrey Hepburn and Woody Allen retrospectives, film noir feasts and Jewish celebrations along with cult classics, weather-themed classics, Warner Bros. classics, Japanese and Italian classics--enough classics to make you wonder what failed to make the cut.

Movie mania in Orange County continues with a Mexican flavor this weekend, highlighted by an entertaining, nontraditional film anthology, “Mexperimental Cinema,” Friday, 8 p.m., at the Huntington Beach Art Center (538 Main St.). $4-$6. (714) 374-1654.

Though slight, it captures the shaggy, laid-back, offbeat mood of Mexican experimental shorts made over the last 30 years or so with clever use of limited resources.

The eight movies--ranging from 2 1/2 to 27 minutes--were shot on Super-8 millimeter or 16-millimeter film, transferred to video and include “leftist polemics and the counterculture fantasies of the student movement, punk rants and political satires,” notes series co-curator Rita Gonzalez, who will be at the art center for a post-screening discussion.

The styles and techniques are imaginative and to some extent recall various works by American experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and Bruce Conners, with whom they share a gritty, cross-cultural, vernacular language.

“The history of Mexico’s mainstream cinema during the ‘golden age’ of the 1940s through the mid-1950s is well documented,” Gonzalez adds. Not so the work of Mexico’s independent and fringe filmmakers.

“My take on hosting the program,” says Tyler Stallings, the art center’s curator of programs, “is that we’re supporting experimental filmmaking. There aren’t a lot of venues for that in Southern California, which is surprising given that this is where the American industry is located. There’s Filmforum and the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles. But that’s about it, and Mexican experimental film is a particular niche that hasn’t been seen.”

At the UC Irvine Film and Video Center, moreover, the mainstream Festival of Mexican Cinema of the 1990s continues Saturday, 7 p.m., with a double-bill screening of Gerardo Lara’s “Un ano perdido” (1993), a coming-of-age film involving feminism and love, preceded by Alejandro Moya’s “Ponchada” (1994), a black-comedy short involving murder. At Humanities Instructional Building, Room 100 (Bridge Road, near Pereira Drive), UCI campus. $4-$6. (949) 824-7418.

Also continuing at the UCI Film and Video Center, a series called Looking at Revolution presents Ettore Scola’s “La Nuit de Varennes” (1982). This smart, lavishly produced period picture set during the French Revolution centers on the night in 1791 when Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette fled Paris to escape the guillotine. The cast has lots of characters, both fictional and historical, including Casanova and Tom Paine.

For period settings, fictional and sometimes historical characters--let alone high-minded vintage adaptations of literary works from E.M. Forster and Henry James to Tama Janowitz--nothing is likely to beat Views of Merchant Ivory, a two-week retrospective of movies by the team of Ismail Merchant (producer), James Ivory (director) and, frequently, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (writer). It opens Friday at the Port Theatre (2905 East Coast Highway, Corona Del Mar). $4.50-$7 (each film). (949) 673-6260.

Although not a complete retrospective of the 40 or so Merchant Ivory pictures turned out over 35 years, the series enables moviegoers to catch up with 14 of them, some of the early ones in new 35-millimeter prints--including “The Householder” (their first, adapted from Jhabvala’s novel and made with Satyajit Ray) and “Shakespeare Wallah” (their second, with which “the trio hit its stride,” Times reviewer Kevin Thomas has said)--as well as the recent, more familiar ones.

The schedule is Friday-Sunday: “Howards End” (1992) and “The Remains of the Day” (1993); Monday-Tuesday: “Mr. & Mrs. Bridge” (1990) and “Jefferson in Paris” (1995); Wednesday-April 30: “Heat and Dust” (1983) and “Shakespeare Wallah” (1965); May 1-2: “Maurice” (1987) and “Quartet” (1981); May 3-4: “The Bostonians” (1984) and “The Europeans” (1979); May 5-6: “Roseland” (1977) and “Slaves of New York” (1989); May 7: “The Householder” (1963) and “In Custody” (1994).

New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion’s first feature, “Sweetie” (1985), will screen Friday, 7 and 9 p.m., by the UC Irvine Film Society at the UCI Student Center, Crystal Cove Auditorium, Pereira Drive and West Peltason Road. $2.50-$4.50. (949) 824-5588.

“Sweetie” centers on the lives of two sisters. “The normal one” is an edgy bundle of phobias and repression; the unbalanced one is Sweetie, an overgrown daddy’s girl. Bittersweet and unconventional, the picture has been described by Campion as “loosely autobiographical.”

Fritz Lang’s “M” (1931), starring Peter Lorre, screens Friday, 6:30 p.m., at the Orange County Museum of Art Education Center, 855 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. $3-$5. (949) 759-1122.

Among the most famous art-house movies ever made, Fritz Lang’s “M” tells a story--about a child-murderer, suspected to be a former mental patient, who is eventually trapped in an attic by his pursuer--that doesn’t play well by contemporary standards. But when Joseph Losey directed “a foolish American remake in 1951,” British film historian David Shipman has noted, “Lang remarked that it . . . brought him the best notices of his [Lang’s] career.”

Finally, Dutch writer-director Michael Verhoeven’s “The Nasty Girl” (1990), a wickedly satirical movie based on a real-life tale of a German student who becomes a Nazi hunter, screens Wednesday, 7 p.m., at Chapman University (Argyros Forum, Room 208), 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. (714) 744-7018.

A film not to be missed, it takes place in a Bavarian town where someone has been scribbling anti-fascist graffiti: “Where were you from 1939-45? Where are you now?” The story focuses on Sonja, 20, who wins first prize in an all-Europe political essay contest with a decidedly noncontroversial paper.

Encouraged by that, she enters another contest with a very different piece of prose, “My Hometown During the Third Reich,” which leaves the burghers of the town less than thrilled. To the best of their recollection there was just one Nazi, now long dead. Sonja discovers a news clipping from 1934, however, that reported two local clergymen denouncing a Jewish businessman.

As The Times’ then-movie critic Sheila Benson noted in her review, for the fictional town “substitute picturesque Passau, on three rivers in deepest Bavaria, the seat of that country’s Catholic archdiocese, [said to be] ‘a Baroque Eden.’ It was also where Adolf Hitler spent his youth, where Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the Nazi security forces, lives, and where Adolf Eichmann was married.”

Benson noted, too, that Passau “is also the birthplace of the movie’s real Sonja, Anja Elisabeth Rosmus, whose upstanding middle-class family saw to it that their bright daughter had a sound parochial-school education. In 1984 [when her] second essay . . . put Passau on the map again . . . consequences to Rosmus [were] as vicious as those in the movie.”

Among other things, “anonymous callers suggested it was she who should have been in a concentration camp, ‘gassed, chopped up and pulverized.’ ”

Given the risky subject, Verhoeven might have been expected to handle it straightforwardly, even with a solemn treatment. Instead, he tells the story through a “theatrical mixture of colors and styles”--funny, surreal and serious--and with “an irresistible actress,” the remarkable Lena Stolze, who also stars in “The White Rose” and Percy Adlon’s “The Five Last Days.”

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Screening in L.A. and beyond:

“City of Lights, City of Angels,” a week of new French films plus a restored color print of Jacques Tati’s 1949 classic “Jour de Fe^te,” will screen at the Directors Guild, one of the event’s sponsors.

The series opens Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. with its most joyous, most sumptuous offering, Philippe De Broca’s exhilarating swashbuckler “En Garde.”

The title of Bruno Dumont’s stunning “Life of Jesus” (Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.), winner at Cannes of the Special Golden Camera award, offers an ironic commentary on the mundane existence of a Normandy teenager, Freddy (David Douche), who hangs out with his equally aimless and ignorant bike-riding pals in their red-brick town, where absolutely nothing seems to happen.

Anne Fontaine’s “Dry Cleaning” (April 30 at 7:30 p.m.) has much the same impact as “Life of Jesus.” Charles Berling’s Jean-Marie is a perfectionist workaholic who is beginning to make his wife (Miou-Miou) bored and restless when a handsome young man, Loic (Stanislas Merhar), unexpectedly becomes part of their lives.

The sole disappointment is Lucas Belvaux’s tedious “Just for a Laugh” (May 1 at 7:30), in which a garrulous househusband (Jean-Pierre Leaud) befriends the man (Antoine Chappey) with whom his beautiful, much-younger wife (Ornella Muti) is having an increasingly serious affair.

Any Jacques Rivette film is a major event, and “Secret Defense” (May 2 at 12:30 p.m.) is another triumph for the ever-rigorous New Wave pioneer.

The great Jacques Tati (1908-1982) made his 1949 feature debut with “Jour de Fe^te,” (May 2 at 4:30 p.m.), which reveals his devotion to Buster Keaton in his physicality and in his constant tangle with man’s inventions.

Concluding the series is Alain Corneau’s dazzling “Le Cousin” (May 2 at 7:30 p.m.), surely the week’s most accessible film, ideal not only for American distribution but for remake as well.

Advance tickets will be on sale Saturday and Sunday in the lobby of the Directors Guild of America, 7920 Sunset Blvd. (213) 206-8013.