Boys Might Be Boys

Imagine a 7-year-old boy who loves dressing up. In dresses, that is, with lipstick, spike heels and tasteful jewelry. Saucer-eyed Ludovic (Georges du Fresne) happily believes he’s a girl. When he grows up, he plans to marry his best pal, Jerome.

Initially amused, then perplexed and threatened by their son’s fantasy--which, unfortunately, involves his father’s boss’ son--Ludovic’s parents freak out. So do the well-to-do neighbors and the parents of other kids at Ludovic’s school.

“Ma Vie en Rose” (My Life in Pink), which won a Golden Globe award for best foreign film last year, is the debut feature film of Belgian director Alain Berliner, a punk rock musician who segued into writing scripts for TV movies.

“Children are ‘in construction’--developing,” Berliner said in an interview a couple of years ago. “Why not accept Ludovic as he is? Why not explore both your feminine and masculine sides? Nobody knows how Ludovic is going to end up.”

For audiences, Ludovic’s identity seems infinitely malleable. Berliner says that gays see the boy as gay (it won the best-picture award at the 1997 Seattle Gay and Lesbian Film Festival), transsexuals claim him as one of their own, and straights say he’s just going through a phase.

“You Americans love to put labels on everything,” Berliner continued. “We Europeans are more accepting of sexual fluidity. For example, [female screenwriter] Chris vander Stappen lives as a man with a woman and children. But I don’t call her anything.”

The broad appeal of “Ma Vie en Rose” has a lot to do with what Times film critic Kenneth Turan called “the perfectly pitched performance” of 11-year-old Du Fresne as well as the film’s overall tone.

Turan says it’s “a lively, high-spirited film that is at once light and serious, sentimental and smart.”

* “Ma Vie en Rose” (My Life in Pink), 1997. In French with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes. MPAA rating: R, for brief strong language. Times guidelines: adult subject matter.

UC Irvine Student Center, Crystal Cove auditorium. Friday at 7 and 9 p.m. Tickets: $4.50 general, $2.50-3.50 UCI students, faculty, staff and non-UCI students. (949) 824-5588. Supported by the Cultural Services department of the French Embassy and the Cultural Ministry of France. Part of UCI’s Friday night winter film series, “Between the Laughter and the Tears.”

Way Back to Basics

In 1995, for a project celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Lumiere brothers’ pioneering moving picture camera, 40 international directors made short films using restored original equipment.

To maintain the period flavor, there were a few ground rules: a maximum running time of 52 seconds; no synchronized sound; no artificial lighting; and no more than three takes.

The resulting compilation, “Lumiere et compagnie,” a project for French TV, features work by such contemporary cinema luminaries as Constantin Costa Gavras, Peter Greenaway, James Ivory, Spike Lee, David Lynch, Arthur Penn, Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders and Zhang Yimou.

Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, deemed the films “often wonderful, and always revealing in the way they show professional directors working on what amounts to a haiku.”

Subjects range from a 19th century street scene (by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory) to lovers kissing on a revolving turntable (Claude Lelouch).

Auguste and Louis Jean Lumieres were chemists who figured out how to combine the animation of Thomas Edison’s peephole Kinetoscope with projection. Their cinematographe served as motion picture camera and projector, operating at 16 frames per second.

Their films are of everyday occurrences--workers leaving a factory, a train arriving at a station, a baby being fed--which enthralled audiences with the sometimes shockingly visceral impact of seeing reality duplicated on a big screen for the first time.

Several of the contemporary shorts relate directly to these images. Patrice Leconte juxtaposes the original train film with an image of the same station a century later--where a Eurostar express whizzes by without stopping.

* “Lumiere et compagnie,” 1995. Running time: 88 minutes. Unrated. UCI Film and Video Center, Humanities Instructional Building, Room 100 (off West Peltason Drive). Today, 7 p.m. Tickets: $6 general, $4 students, faculty and staff. (949) 824-7418.