Exploring a Troubled Landscape

The UCLA Film Archive and the Vietnamese Cinema Assn.’s “Contemporary Films From Vietnam” concludes this weekend in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater with four masterful films.

Screening tonight at 7:30 p.m. is Nguyen Khac Loi’s remarkable “The Retired General,” in which a career military man (Manh Linh) retires to his large rural estate only to be appalled with the petty, corrupt and self-absorbed behavior of his family and neighbors. This is a subtle, disturbing film, shot through with both humor and sadness.

Vuong Duc’s 1993 “The Wild Reed” (Saturday at 7 p.m.) offers a uniquely powerful vision of what the aftermath of the Vietnam War was like for the Vietnamese people. A lieutenant (Don Duong, stoically impressive) returns to his home village as part of a mission to locate the remains of as many soldiers as possible, which means digging up a seemingly unending number of mass graves. Whatever promise of joy a return home might mean for the war-weary lieutenant is dashed when he realizes that his wife, believing him dead, has married another man. The way in which this personal drama plays out against the larger landscape is tremendously affecting. This screening will be followed by a panel discussion.

Dang Nhat Minh’s 1984 “When the Tenth Month Comes” (Sunday at 7 p.m.) is a film of pastoral beauty, great sensitivity and subtlety. In a rural village, a young wife (Le Van) conceals the news of her husband’s death in battle from her elderly, ailing father-in-law with the help of letters written in the dead man’s name by the local schoolteacher who, in fact, falls in love with her. Their ensuing chaste friendship, subject to gossip and criticism, gives way to the larger issue of how to honor the war dead: Shall the wife mourn her loss, even after her father-in-law’s death, or has she the right to start a new life for herself?

This landmark series ends with Dang’s superb 1995 “Nostalgia for Countryland.” This is another film that evokes a treacherous longing for the pastoral existence which is in fact both grueling and endangered. It’s an emotion-charged yet low-key psychological coming-of-age drama in which a young man (Ta Ngoc Bao) and his sister-in-law (Thuy Huong) work the fields; her husband has been gone for years and is unlikely ever to return. The situation is further complicated with the arrival of a beautiful woman (Le Van), a native villager, who has returned after years abroad, yearning for the simple life of her childhood. Downbeat but extraordinarily moving.

*

The archive’s “The Films of Shohei Imamura” concludes Tuesday at 7 p.m. in Bridges Theater with a 1968 Imamura masterpiece, “The Profound Desire of the Gods” followed by another key work, the 1981 “Eijanaika.” In the earlier film an engineer arrives on a tiny island where the ruling family practices incest and primitive religious rites. There he is to map out plans to develop its sugar-cane crops and to build a refinery. Effectively blurring fantasy and reality, Imamura takes us into an exotic world whose ways gradually come to seem no less barbaric than our own.

“Eijanaika” is a defiant slapstick tragedy involving a poor farmer (Shigeru Izumiya) and his wife (Kaori Momoi), a kind of Every Couple, who are caught up in the chaotic events of the 1860s, when Japan was at last opened up to the world. “Eijanaika,” a slogan meaning roughly “why not?,” has all the robust elements of the traditional Japanese period picture. But Imamura’s view is entirely personal, finding that revolution is valuable even if it is illusory. “Eijanaika” is above all a rowdy, impassioned celebration of life in the face ofoverpowering uncertainties and inevitable injustices. (310) 206-FILM.

*

The American Cinematheque screens tonight at 7:30 p.m. at Raleigh two disturbing, illuminating documentaries centering on two very different American communities. Seth Henrikson and David Sarno’s 64-minute “Goreville, U.S.A.” delves into the thorny issue of gun control in the heartland, where gun ownership is seen as a bedrock constitutional right. James Knight’s quirky 57-minute “Ballad of Fire” chronicles Knight’s own Silver Lake neighborhood, which is under siege by an arsonist, and discovers an astonishing range of social and political injustices coming to the surface. Knight has a distinctive, authentic talent--and also a tendency to an off-putting facetiousness.

The cinematheque’s “Recent Spanish Cinema” series continues Friday at Raleigh at 7 p.m. with Jaime de Armin~an’s 1971 “My Dearest Senorita,” a wry comedy starring Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez as a small-town, middle-aged spinster who at last confronts her transsexuality. Jose Luis Borau, who plays a doctor, produced the 1971 film and wrote it with De Armin~an. It will be followed at 9:15 p.m. by Gerardo Vera’s deliciously outrageous “La Celestina,” a lusty romantic tragedy of the Renaissance seething with passion and flowery speeches. The story involves a naive young nobleman encouraged by his crafty manservant into appealing to a witch, Celestina (Terele Pavez), to cast a spell on a beautiful maiden (Penelope Cruz), so that she will love him. Vera’s actors keep straight faces amid emotional extravagance and rampant villainy, and Pavez’s witch emerges not as a figure of evil so much as a mature woman who knows human nature all too well--but not well enough to temper her own greed. With Maribel Verdu and other outstanding young actors. A decade after the sublime “Spirit of the Beehive” Victor Erice in 1983 made the equally mesmerizing “El Sur” (The South), in which we again view the world through the eyes of a child. In this instance she’s an imaginative girl (played by Sonsoles Aranguren at age 8; Iciar Bollan at 13) growing up in the ‘50s in the Northwestern provinces and whose resigned father (veteran Italian actor Omero Antonutti) fought on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War. She keeps hearing about “the South,” this mysterious, elusive locale yet never seems to get to go there. “El Sur” is suffused with a yearning for a lost paradise--and a subsequent lost innocence. “El Sur” screens Saturday at 7:15 p.m. and will be followed at 9 p.m. with a Jose Luis Borau double feature, “Double-Edged Murder,” a 1964 film noir, and “B. Must Die,” a 1973 political thriller starring Darren McGavin and Stepahne Audran. (213) 466-FILM.

*

The 1981 “Mandala,” screening Saturday at 7 p.m. at UC Irvine as part of an ongoing Korean film series, remains one of preeminent filmmaker Im Kwon-Taek’s most controversial and important pictures. In the film a young itinerant monk, Pobun (Ahn Sung-Kee), is transformed by his encounter with a wayward older monk, Jisan (Chun Mu-Song), who’s striving for spiritual enlightenment despite being given to heavy bouts of boozing and wenching. It’s not that Pobun is tempted to emulate Jisan but that he’s confounded by the possibility that a libertine, having thrown over traditional Buddhist practices and rituals, could nevertheless be sincere in his quest and have even acquired some hard-won wisdom along the way. For ticket and parking information: (714) 824-7418; for festival information: (714) 824-1992.

*

This weekend the outstanding “Post-Colonial Classics of the Korean Cinema” series will be held at the Korean Cultural Center, 5505 Wilshire Blvd., instead of UC Irvine. It will present at 7 p.m. the 1993 Im Kwon-Taek masterpiece “Soponje,” Korea’s biggest box-office hit of all time. First screened at the Center in June, 1994, it is a stark tale about a hard-drinking, hard-driving master of the plaintive pansori music who wanders the countryside with his two foster children. As painful as it is profound, it reveals the virtually limitless sacrifices an art form can demand of its practitioners. (714) 824-7418.

Note: San Francisco experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr will present “For Daniel,” composed of home movies he shot of his infant son, at Filmforum Sunday at 7 p.m. at LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd. (213) 526-2911.