Caught in the Act of Being Guys

You have to admire documentarian Maggie Hadleigh-West for her courage and honesty in the making of her “War Zone” (Friday at the Grande 4-Plex for one week), and you have to acknowledge that in taking an extreme position as to what constitutes sexual harassment, she has made a highly provocative film--and not in the sexual sense, one hastens to add.

For much of her 78-minute film, shot mainly in New York with additional sequences in New Orleans and San Francisco, Hadleigh-West, who accurately defines herself as “normal-looking,” is seen wearing black leggings, black Lycra tank top (sans bra) and black miniskirt, and carrying a video camera. She is accompanied by an unseen cameraman, Robert Pennington, as she walks through city streets, swift to turn her cameras on any man she has caught looking at her in what she considers to be a sexual way. (Of the 1,050 men she taped, 53 turn up in the finished work.)

To her, the action of any man who in her judgment expresses what she considers sexual attraction to her, even if it is the most innocuous-sounding compliment, constitutes sexual harassment. In those cases, she swiftly retaliates, poking her camera in the man’s face, accusing him of ogling her or worse and quizzing him relentlessly on what she considers his offensive behavior. Not surprisingly, a number of men react in ways that are unprintable.

Now Hadleigh-West is trying to make an exceedingly important point: that it is her belief that most women feel unsafe on the streets for the simple fact that it can be difficult, if not impossible, to tell if a man’s taking notice of a woman is going to lead to some form of sexual assault.

Many of her interviewees, blue-collar and construction worker types, are genuinely taken aback that what they mean as a compliment could be construed as disrespect. Man after man cites the natural attraction of men for women, yet Hadleigh-West never answers them. She also never answers them when they point out that women who dress provocatively might be hoping for some kind of response. Indeed, she apparently doesn’t believe that any woman might appreciate any public recognition of her attractiveness. It leads us to conclude that, in the street at least, no man should ever express any reaction to any woman whatsoever because any such expression is inherently sexual and therefore potentially threatening.

Yet her own unwillingness to differentiate between what many women might consider a harmless appreciation from the opposite sex and that which is patently rude, offensive and intimidating complicates her task in raising men’s consciousness about their behavior toward women.

She is on firmer ground in her inclusion of several other women in her film. Not surprisingly, a beautiful, young, light-skinned woman who identifies herself as black, and a beautiful Asian woman report ugly racist remarks in the attention they attract, just as a pretty, somewhat plump San Franciscan reports cruel jibes men make about her weight.

“War Zone” is a street film and its men are mostly blue-collar guys, the majority of whom are black. With a couple of jarring exceptions, they are more open and secure in defending themselves than are the white-collar types, who tend to leer rather than speak and resent being caught in the act. Of course, there are plenty of men of all ages and ethnic backgrounds who are stupefyingly obnoxious; the worst-behaved and most arrogant men in the film are young, white, blue-collar males. The coolest person is an elderly man Hadleigh-West accuses of staring at her breasts. He calmly responds that he was merely noticing a bandage on her arm, hoping it doesn’t hurt, explaining that he is on his way to the doctor to get a shot of cortisone to ease the pain in his own arm.

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“Highway Patrolman” (tonight at the New Beverly Cinema, 7165 Beverly Blvd., at 9:55 only) is maverick director Alex Cox’s finest film to date and represents his best work since his terrific debut feature, the funky, surreal 1984 “Repo Man.” Released in the U.S. in 1994, “Highway Patrolman,” in Spanish with English subtitles, opens just the way one would expect of Cox--with a darkly satirical take on his subject, an idealistic young Mexican’s training at the National Highway Patrol Academy in Mexico City. But the British-born Cox and his producer-screenwriter, Lorenzo O’Brien, a Peruvian raised in Mexico, gradually get more serious once their wiry, wistful hero (Roberto Sosa) takes up his first assignment in a remote town in Durango.

It would seem that working in a foreign language has given Cox the necessary freedom and detachment not to worry about being hip and to take the plunge into classic screen storytelling, backed by O’Brien’s superbly structured script. While it rightly skewers American hypocrisy and complicity in Mexican drug trafficking, “Highway Patrolman” abounds in the virtues of traditional filmmaking. Indeed, there is an epic quality, moral as well as visual, to the hero’s odyssey that recalls the westerns of John Ford and such John Huston films as “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “Under the Volcano.”

Almost immediately, Sosa’s earnest, likable Pedro Rojas discovers the impossibility of adhering to the straight and narrow. On the one hand, he’s too underpaid to resist accepting the occasional mordida once he’s a husband and father; on the other, a strict enforcement of the law becomes a hardship and injustice on people who are simply struggling to survive. If he is to survive, Pedro must learn to steer a sensible course between extremes and discover his own code of behavior.

To be sure, he will be put to the test time and again, and in the process he discovers his sticking point is drugs, which are transported regularly through the region and which are all too available to the locals. Although he marries the hearty, plain-spoken Griselda (Zaide Silvia Gutierrez, who has the looks and personality of Mercedes Ruehl), he is drawn to the beautiful but drug-addicted prostitute Maribel (Vanessa Bauche).

In its way, “Highway Patrolman” is a coming-of-age film, both for its hero and for Cox himself. It’s also a beautiful, gritty film, shot by Miguel Garzon and scored evocatively by Zander Schloss, steeped in the atmosphere of vast, desert-like vistas slashed by highways sizzling in the heat. “Highway Patrolman” will be preceded at 7:30 p.m. with John Sayles’ 1997 “Men With Guns.” (213) 938-4038.

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The Nuart brings back Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1985 “Antonio Gaudi,” a stunning 72-minute homage to the Catalan architect whose buildings--Art Nouveau carried to glorious extremes--are every bit as undulating as those sand dunes.

Gaudi blurred the line between architecture and sculpture and, drawing on motifs from ancient regional structures, created an amazing array of sumptuously decorated fairy-tale buildings that remain the glory of Barcelona and the surrounding area. “Antonio Gaudi” screens Saturday and Sunday at noon. (310) 478-6379.