The Oui Generation

The American Cinematheque’s “Belles du Jour: French Actresses--The New Generation,” which runs Friday through Feb. 25 at the Egyptian, focuses on an array of young French performers, some of whom are familiar to American audiences. Among them are Nathalie Richard, Romane Bohringer, Elsa Zylberstein and Julie Delpy, all of whom will be making personal appearances.

The series commences with two films that were not available for previews by their U.S. distributors: Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s musical “Jeanne and the Perfect Guy” (Friday at 7 p.m., followed by an opening night party), starring Virginie Ledoyen, and Olivier Assayas’ “Late August, Early September” (Saturday at 7 p.m.), a drama about the impact of the terminal illness of an acclaimed author (Francois Cluzet), featuring Ledoyen and also Richard, who will appear at the screening.

“Late August, Early September” will be followed at 9:45 p.m. with Sylvie Verheyde’s “Un Frere” (A Brother), a somber and complicated coming-of-age story. In it, the talent of a young photographer (Jeannick Gravelines) gives him a chance to escape a drab existence in a bleak suburban Paris housing project, but first he must come to terms with his incestuous feelings for his pert, cool younger sister (Emma de Caunes). While “Un Frere” is much like lots (and lots) of French films in its near-total humorlessness, it is nonetheless intimate and insightful, and breathtakingly brisk and assured--qualities that are also typical of worthy French films.

Didier Haudepin’s “Those Were the Days” (Wednesday at 7 p.m.) is at once a love story and a mystery but is above all a scathing expose of the extreme harshness and doctrinaire instruction of French prep schools, the very embodiment of Gallic pride and arrogance. Elodie Bouchez stars as 17-year-old Delphine, a first-year student at a Paris school whose pupils are either vying for entrance to the Ecole Normale Superieure or St. Cyr, the French military academy.

Delphine, who lives with a single mother and two much younger brothers in public housing, strives mightily to prepare for her entrance exams. Meanwhile, Claude (Sophie Aubry), a diplomat’s daughter and intellectual leftist, is having an affair with a fellow student, the handsome Neo-Fascist Axel (Melvil Poupaud), with whom she shares a luxe apartment. Only hours after Delphine and Claude meet, Claude plummets to her death from the top of a dorm stairwell. Delphine becomes involved with Axel, who can attract as well as repel, and also Claude’s vulnerable younger brother Bertrand (Gael Morel). Delphine has embarked upon a journey of discovery both of self and of the mystery surrounding Claude’s death. If “Those Were the Days” is even bleaker than “Un Frere,” it is also more substantial, made with incisiveness and grace, admirable in its unswerving critical spirit. The cast is a marvel, with Bouchez and Morel both having established themselves with Andre Techinee’s superb “Wild Reeds.” (323) 466-FILM.

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In the light of the renaissance of the Brazilian cinema in the ‘90s, the UCLA Film Archive is presenting at the James Bridges Theater in Melnitz Hall “Cinema Novo and Beyond,” an eight-feature survey spanning more than 30 years of films, beginning with the movement that revolutionized Brazilian films in a manner roughly parallel to France’s New Wave.

It opens tonight at 7:30 p.m. with Jouquim Pedro de Andrade’s “Macunaima,” an outrageous, freewheeling 1969 political allegory that might be described as being like a “Li’l Abner” comic strip vignette that has been transformed by the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Or a cross between Jean-Luc Godard and Woody Allen, with a little Marx Brothers thrown in for good measure. It assumes of the viewer a great deal of knowledge about Brazilian folklore as well as politics and history. Even allowing for this obstacle, the film is pretty tough going, especially in its first needlessly tedious 30 minutes. Silly more often than funny, it demands considerable indulgence and doubtless would be best appreciated by those who are revolution-minded but also possess a strong taste for nonsense comedy.

At any rate, Macunaima, the film’s Candide-like hero, is born full-grown in the jungle and, after a series of fantastic adventures, takes off for the city with his brothers, one of whom resembles the late Flip Wilson and the other rock artist Leon Russell. Born black, Macunaima (Grande Otelo) turns white (Paulo Jose)--and therefore racist--when he is drenched by a magic geyser.

In the city he falls in love with a beautiful guerrilla fighter who has in her possession a magic stone but who nevertheless inadvertently blows herself up. The stone ends up in the possession of a cannibalistic capitalist, Venceslau (Milton Goncalves), and much of the film concerns Macunaima’s attempt to retrieve it. De Andrade, working from a 1920s novel by his namesake, Mario de Andrade, has undeniable if slapdash flair, but his film does not begin to have the form, accessibility and, therefore, impact of Nelson Periera dos Santos’ contemporaneous “How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman.”

“Macunaima” will be followed by Periera dos Santos’ 1963 “Vidas Secas” (Barren Lives), a landmark in the launching of Cinema Novo. In an austere Neo-Realist style, it tells of a peasant family’s heart-rending struggle simply to survive, ever at the mercy of both landowners and the elements. (The film was adapted from a novel by Graciliano Ramos.)

“Cinema Novo and Beyond” runs through Tuesday and includes Bruno Barreto’s 1976 “Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands” (Sunday, following the 7 p.m. screening of the 1996 “Little Book of Love”). One of the most popular Brazilian films of all time, it’s a ribald comedy in which sexy Sonia Braga, stuck with a dull new husband (Mauro Mendonca), is comforted by the spirit of her rakish first husband (Jose Wilker). (310) 206-FILM.

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Among many worthy films screening in the final days of the Pan African Film Festival at the Magic Johnson Theatres is Henri du Parc’s “Un Couleur Cafe” (The Color of Coffee), an Ivory Coast production, a comedy that grows progressively serious. Gabriel Zahon stars as Doc, a janitor at a Paris hospital who takes a second wife, Kada (Mbendo), from Africa in hopes that she will present him with a son to carry on the family name. As his wise first wife, Awa (Awa Sene Star), remarks, “You live like you’re still in an African village.” And in doing so he ultimately and inadvertently threatens to devastate the lives of other Africans struggling to survive in a fundamentally racist society. “Une Couleur Cafe” (Friday at 8:05 p.m. and Monday at 2:40 p.m.) is too talky and overlong, yet shrewdly uses humor to reveal the precariousness of life for Third World immigrants in France. (213) 896-8221 or (323) 295-1706.

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Note: The Nuart will present two of the charismatic action star Chow Yun-Fat’s finest gangster films, Ringo Lam’s “City on Fire” (1987), which inspired “Reservoir Dogs” (Friday only, at midnight), and John Woo’s 1986 “A Better Tomorrow” (Feb. 19 only, at midnight). (310) 478-6379.

As part of its Meryl Streep retrospective, LACMA is presenting Saturday at 7:30 p.m. a new 35 mm print of “Sophie’s Choice” (1982) and dedicating its screening to the memory of its director, Alan J. Pakula.