Krichtofovitch Look at Change Is a ‘Friend’ Indeed

His last time out, in 1991, Ukrainian director Viatchslav Krichtofovitch made a considerable splash with his acclaimed “Adam’s Rib” at the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors Fortnight, a showcase established in 1969 for first- or second-time directors.

His latest film, “A Friend of the Deceased” (1997)--seen at last year’s Directors Fortnight--has also drawn critical praise and will have its Orange County premiere Friday at the Port Theatre, 2905 E. Coast Highway, Corona del Mar. $4.50-$7. (949) 673-6260.

“Elegant and tantalizing,” Times reviewer Kevin Thomas says, “Friend” is an “anti-thriller” in which a former academic translator trying to survive the corrupt and paranoid conditions of life in post-Soviet Ukraine hires not one but two hit men to more or less solve his problems.

The six-year interval between pictures “was not something I chose,” Krichtofovitch said in a publicity interview in the press kit printed by Sony Pictures, the film’s distributor.

Rather, his inactivity reflected a lack of “any demand for cinema, or [for] even culture as a whole” in the “economic and moral disarray” of his native country during the 1990s.

Ordinarily, press-kit interviews are not worth noting. But Krichtofovitch avoids the usual movie puffery and makes the sort of sense worth quoting.

“The main subject of the film,” he said, “is the inability of an intelligent, refined, cultured but weak man to find his place in the new society that is emerging after the breakup of the Soviet Union.”

In post-Soviet Ukraine, as in Russia itself and much of the former Soviet Union, a new elite made up of high-flying entrepreneurs, mobsters and black marketeers tends to dominate all walks of life instead of the old party bureaucracy of political hacks.

“I was intrigued by the idea of a person who can’t find his way in this new situation,” Krichtofovitch said, “where all of a sudden you are free and have all these things you could do . . . and yet you don’t know what to do.”

What also attracted him was “the idea that . . . someone [can] actually lose himself, the person he thought he was.” The central character feels that “the way things are,” people to be pitied will not be forgiven. Society “won’t forgive people who are weak,” Krichtofovitch said, “and not everyone can be strong.

“We can ask of people a lot,” he continued. “That they be sincere, that they do not behave badly. But we can’t ask them to behave like heroes. That is a deeply held conviction of mine.”

Also on Friday, Claude Chabrol’s “La Ceremonie: A Judgment in Stone” (1995)--chosen the best foreign film of the year by the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.--will be screened at 7 and 9 p.m. at UC Irvine Student Center, in the Crystal Cove Auditorium, on the UCI campus (on Pereira Drive, near West Peltason Road). $2.50-$4.50. (949) 824-5588.

The picture revolves around the hiring of a maid, which seals the fate of a privileged family of the haute bourgeoisie that hasn’t the slightest inkling of what it has gotten itself into. Jacqueline Bisset plays a stylish well-mannered beauty who lives with her debonair businessman husband in a large, isolated country estate.

Visualizing Eros continues today at the UCI Film and Video Center with two Asian films, “Stand by Your Man” (1993) and “Happy Together” (1997), in the Humanities Instructional Building, Room 214. (West Peltason Road, near Pereira Drive). $4-$6. (949) 824-7418.

“Stand by Your Man” is described as combining “reedited Hollywood film clips” of Asian female characters in a satirical music-video context. The superficial material is meant to provoke. It takes a look at “the limited imagery available [of] Asian women as [anything other than] sexual playthings or war victims.”

“Happy Together,” which earned Wong Kar-wai a director’s award at the Cannes festival last year, focuses on “the erotic energy between two gay lovers from Hong Kong” who have just arrived in Argentina.

One becomes “a good-time boy who turns tricks for pin money.” The other, wounded by his lover’s changes, takes menial jobs “to earn money for his passage home and tries to pick up the pieces of his life.”

The Festival of Mexican Cinema of the 1990s continues Saturday, 7 p.m., with “La Mujer de Benjamin” (“Benjamin’s Woman”) (1991), also at the UCI Film and Video Center. $4-$6. (949) 824-7418. Directed by Carlos Carrera, the picture is a beauty-and-the-beast tale of a young girl desired by a shy simpleton and takes place in a Mexican village ruled by complacency.

Finally, there will be an Orange Coast College Student Film and Video Festival on Friday, 7 p.m., in the college’s Robert B. Moore Theatre, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. $4. (714) 432-5810.