A Dizzy Web of Tales

For roughly the first half of its 180 minutes, “The Saragossa Manuscript” is a masterpiece of the macabre, but the second is spoiled by mounting tedium. However, any judgment of this lavish, 1965 Polish production, which the American Cinematheque is screening today (at 8 p.m.) through Sunday at the Lloyd E. Rigler Theater at the Egyptian (6712 Hollywood Blvd.), must ultimately be tentative, because even with good subtitles one cannot hope to keep track of one of the most convoluted plots in the history of the movies. It is being presented by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, who with the Grateful Dead’s late Jerry Garcia rescued and restored it for preservation at the Pacific Film Archive.

Indeed, that complexity is the whole point of Jan Potocki’s witty 18th century classic, brought to the screen by director Wojciech Has with breathtaking splendor. Having entertained his ailing wife with the tales of “A Thousand and One Nights,” Potocki decided to write for her a Polish “Arabian Nights,” in which he pushed the device of a story within a story within a story almost to infinity.

Hero Alphonse van Worden, a young captain in the Wallonian Guards of the king of Spain toward the end of the Napoleonic era, encounters on his way to Madrid two Moorish princesses while staying overnight in a deserted inn in the rugged mountains of the Sierra Morena. They tell him that as the descendant of a powerful Moorish family, he has been entrusted with several missions, but he must first be tested to prove his honor.

What follows is a series of fantastic adventures that eventually lead Worden to an encounter with a magician and a mathematician, who struggle for control of his soul. Each tells myriad stories, with characters who in turn relate their tales--all of which takes us further away from the hero and creates an added challenge for those of us who do not speak Polish.

Even so, it’s easy to praise the superb acting of the huge cast, headed by a dashing, aristocratic Zbigniew Cybulski, who is barely recognizable as the same man who won international fame as the bespectacled hero of “Ashes and Diamonds.” Elaborate costumes and sets and stunning photography (which captures the antique quality of Goya prints) are flawless. The deft juxtaposition of striking images of beauty and terror is the equal of anything by Ingmar Bergman, a director with whom Has has much in common, both in style and themes. Also at the Cinematheque: “Down Under Shorts,” a program of short films from Australia (and one from New Zealand). (323) 466-FILM.

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“Changing the Guard: The Festival of New British Cinema” continues Friday at 7:30 p.m. at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater (5905 Wilshire Blvd.) with the venturesome, well-acted “Urban Ghost Story,” in which destructive supernatural forces invade the drab housing project apartment of a Glasgow teenager, her single mother and her little half-brother. Considering that the family is barely managing and that the mother is being seriously menaced by loan shark goons, piling on the paranormal seems a bit much. But at the core, “Urban Ghost Story,” directed by Genevieve Joliffe and co-written by Chris Jones, does a virtuoso job of playing kitchen-sink realism against “Poltergeist”-like happenings as a way of boldly underlining social commentary on the family’s dire straits. Those straits include, in particular, the daughter’s shaky emotional state in the wake of a car accident that claimed the life of a friend. Also screening is a program of short films by new directors.

The series continues Saturday at 7:30 p.m. with the rowdy and violent “Divorcing Jack,” which you could imagine scoring on home ground but which does not travel particularly well. David Thewlis stars as a boozy, boisterous Belfast newspaper columnist who is deeply skeptical that a charismatic candidate for prime minster in Northern Ireland will be able to deliver the peace he promises. Meanwhile, the married columnist commences an affair with a beautiful art student (Laura Fraser), who swiftly winds up with her throat slashed and whose dying words are the puzzling “divorcing Jack.”

Thewlis is swiftly propelled on a madcap, convoluted adventure, with one hair-raising incident following another. There is, however, a certain straining for dark, knockabout humor in the ensuing shenanigans under the aggressive direction of David Caffrey, working from Colin Bateman’s script of his own novel. Thewlis possesses protean talents, but here his performance is long on showiness and short on depth. “Divorcing Jack” is also yet another film with pretensions to sophistication that indulges disturbingly in affectless violence. Upon discovering the dying art student, Thewlis, in a rage, lunges out at an unknown person in the darkened hall outside her apartment. That person turns out to be the student’s mother, who winds up dead of a broken neck at the bottom of a staircase. After a fleeting expression of regret, the mother’s death is never mentioned again. The second feature is a less-than-riveting, free-wheeling semi-travelogue of the English countryside, “Robinson in Space.” (323) 857-6010.

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Masashi Yamamoto’s “Junk Food,” which opens a one-week run at the Grande 4-Plex (Figueroa at 3rd Street, Los Angeles) on Friday, follows for 24 hours the lives of the individuals living on the edge in Tokyo. They include violent gang kids, a desperate Pakistani, and a young female office worker caught up in drug addiction. Most prominent are a likable young man from Yokohama who has come to Tokyo because of a friend’s death, and the resilient young Asian American prostitute he meets and hangs out with. Yamamoto has brought an easy flow to his storytelling but has nothing new to say about life in a vast, impersonal metropolis. It doesn’t help that his people are not very interesting. (213) 617-3084.

The Sunset 5’s (8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood) “World Cinema” series continues Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. with Hans Petter Moland’s “The Last Lieutenant,” an eloquent film of understated emotional power based on the true story of a 68-year-old Norwegian who retires after 40 years in the merchant marine only to turn around and enlist in the army when Germany invades his country in 1940. Surrender follows without a shot being fired, but Thor Espedal (Espen Skjonberg, a wonderful veteran actor) cannot give up without a fight and winds up leading a ragtag group of resisters in defending a mountain pass. What makes Espedal’s well-told story so effective is the awareness of the men that victory can only be momentary and will inevitably be met with crushing retaliation. “The Last Lieutenant” has qualities of maturity and authority unusual for a first film. It will screen June 26 and 27 at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex (1332 2nd St., Santa Monica). Sunset 5: (323) 848-3500; Monica 4-Plex: (310) 394-9741.

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At the beginning of her elegant and illuminating “Paris Was a Woman” (Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Village at Ed Gould Plaza, 1125 N. McCadden Place, Los Angeles) documentarian Greta Schiller declares that in the first quarter of the 20th century, the Left Bank of the City of Lights was a magnet for women from all over America and Europe, with its “promise of freedom,” of “a life filled with literature and art.” Schiller goes a long way toward balancing the image of Paris between the wars as a male paradise for the likes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

Starting with Gertrude Stein, whose experimental writing influenced Hemingway, and her lover, Alice B. Toklas, virtually all of the key figures in Schiller’s film were lesbians, yet Schiller and writer Andrea Weiss acknowledge this with a reticence bordering on reluctance. Surely, since virtually all of them did become famous in literature and art, some exploration of the connection between their sexual orientation and their creativity could be significant. But the film does not go much beyond remarking that with them, “the muse took human form.”

Schiller, however, is nonetheless invaluable for giving us an idea of what these women were like and why they remain important. We’re told that from 1906 to 1909, only Stein and her brothers purchased Picasso’s paintings, that the Steins in effect created the world’s first collection of modern art, and that Stein and Picasso were kindred spirits. We learn from Janet Flanner, the New Yorker’s peerless Paris correspondent for nearly half a century under the pen name Ge^net, that Toklas was Stein’s muse, enabler and cook--and that “Alice had malice.”

Given equal importance with Stein and Toklas are booksellers Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach. Schiller credits Monnier with establishing the lending library concept in France and with encouraging Beach, an American who became her employee and subsequent lover, with establishing her own nearby bookstore, the famous Shakespeare and Co., which became a literary haven for decades. Beach is remembered for publishing the widely banned “Ulysses,” only to have James Joyce eventually break his contract, leaving her facing bankruptcy. Also key are American heiress Nathalie Barney, who for several generations ran a celebrated salon, and her lover of 62 years, painter Romaine Brooks. A less happy relationship was between writer-journalist extraordinaire Djuna Barnes and alcoholic artist Thelma Wood.

One of the few survivors of this group is noted photographer Gisele Freund, who comments incisively on her friends and colleagues. The modest Beach and the astringent Flanner both lived long enough to give TV interviews from which Schiller could select key sequences. Stills, first-rate archival footage and recordings of Monnier, Toklas and Stein round out the richness of “Paris Was a Woman.” (323) 960-2394.