A Feast for French-Film Lovers

The fourth annual “City of Lights, City of Angels: A Week of New French Films,” always one of the strongest mini-festivals of the year, continues today at the Directors Guild, 7920 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, with the West Coast premiere at 7:30 p.m. of Claire Denis’ “Beau Travail,” set in a small Foreign Legion outpost in East Africa and inspired by Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd.” It arrives with much praise, typical for Denis, the director of “Chocolat,” “Nenette and Boni” and “I Can’t Sleep,” but its distributor, New Yorker Films, did not make it available for press previews. Denis is scheduled to attend.

In Claude Miller’s fresh and compelling “Of Women and Magic” (Friday at 7:30 p.m.), Anne Brochet’s serious Claire, a graduate student preparing for her orals in anthropology, is felled by the migraines that have plagued her for six months and insists her infuriatingly supercilious doctor (Yves Jacques) admit her to a hospital, where she finds herself sharing a room with two women. The young Odette (Mathilde Seigner) has been left paralyzed from the waist down in the aftermath of a miscarriage and is preoccupied with TV and sex. Eleonore (Annie Noel) is an older women who occasionally emerges from catatonia to engage in erratic, menacing yet, in a curious instance, magical behavior. The women clash but gradually their effect upon each other has a healing effect, especially upon Claire, and the film celebrates the nurturing power of women. Wonderful performances blend with Miller’s gentle humor and sensitive touch. Miller is expected to attend.

Saturday brings a 1:30 p.m. screening of the English-language version of Jean-Francois Laguionie’s animated feature, “A Monkey’s Tale,” a charming and graceful fable about two varieties of simians, tree-dwellers and ground-dwellers, whose worlds never meet until a young tree monkey slips and falls to the ground.

The series concludes on a grand note Saturday at 7 p.m. with Raul Ruiz’s elegant and sumptuous three-hour “Time Regained” (“Le Temps Retrouve”), adapted by Gilles Taurand (“Dry Cleaning,” “Wild Reeds”) from the final volume of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” Ruiz floats between past and present in which Proust’s failing health and approaching death (in 1922) parallels the wrenching changes wrought by World War I upon the high society in which the author travels and which he transforms into literature.

These aristocrats also concern themselves with being au courant in the worlds of art, literature and music. You may not be able to follow the film’s increasingly complex narrative without being familiar with the book, but Ruiz brings this vanished world of splendor--a Parisian male bordello is surely fit for a king--to glorious life. An aptly reflective Marcello Mazzarella is a Proust look-alike, and Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Beart, Marie-France Pisier, Chiara Mastroianni and Arielle Dombasle play the glamorous women so cherished by the author. John Malkovich is the kinky gay Baron de Charlus and Pascal Greggory plays his handsome bisexual nephew, who goes off to World War I with a romantic notion of warfare. (310) 206-FILM.

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It is altogether fitting that Steve Yeager’s “Divine Trash: The John Waters Documentary” begins a regular midnight run Friday at the Nuart, for that is the theater andthe time slot where Waters’ “Pink Flamingos” began its seemingly endless run 27 years ago. Waters has gone mainstream, although pretty much on his own terms, and this Sundance best-documentary winner for 1998 is so entertaining that lots of people might enjoy it who wouldn’t ordinarily want to see it at midnight. The Waters story is by now familiar: How a well-bred young man from a conservative Baltimore family became entranced with the New York underground movies of the ‘60s and started making home movies with friends who took as much pleasure in schlocky, outrageous, in-your-face humor. However, this film has the advantage of including interviews with virtually all of the key people in Waters’ career, including his parents and the mother of his hefty muse, the late Divine, born Glenn Milstead.

Waters’ friends and colleagues and even his father acknowledge his business sense, and he intuited that “Pink Flamingos” had enough potential for its making to be documented on film, which gives an illuminating context to this underground classic. Divine’s Babs Johnson, the ultimate in trailer trash, is in lurid competition with Raymond and Connie Marble (David Lochary and Mink Stole) to become “the filthiest human being in the world.” We discover that the tacky look and feel of the early Waters pictures were painstakingly created and not improvised. Waters and film clips make clear that Divine, who considered himself an actor and not a drag queen, was an inspired, gifted comedian. The film concentrates entirely on “Pink Flamingos,” its predecessors and their influence, but they are the films by which Waters will be best remembered. (310) 478-6379.

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The Independent Feature Project West joins the American Cinematheque in presenting tonight at 7 at the Egyptian Theater “The Girls’ Room.” College comedies don’t get much sharper than this clash of personalities between ill-matched roommates. Cat Taber’s Grace is an unapologetic Southern belle caught up in her wedding plans, which are set to follow swiftly her upcoming graduation. At every turn, she’s dogged by the cynical Casey (Soleil Moon Frye), an aspiring actress. Their constant skirmishing eventually yields unexpectedly rigorous self-examination by both young women, who have lots to teach each other about the value of inner direction. Directed as smartly by Irene Turner as it was written by Amanda L. Beall, whose dialogue positively crackles, “The Girls’ Room” is a terrific discovery, and its makers understand how to use color a la Almodovar. Meanwhile, the Marilyn Monroe retrospective continues tonight at 9:30 with “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” running through Sunday.

The cinematheque will also present at the Egyptian May 2-6 the Iceland Naturally Festival as part of a celebration across the U.S. and Canada of the 1,000th anniversary of Icelander Leif Eiriksson’s voyage to North America. H.E. Olafur Ganar Grimsson, president of Iceland, will formally open the series; in attendance will be Hollywood producer Sigurjon “Joni” Sighvattsson, who is also Iceland’s honorary consul general.

Among the films screening are Baltasar Kormakur’s jaunty dark comedy “101 Reykjavik,” in which a Spanish flamenco dancing teacher (Spain’s Victoria Abril) scores with a sheltered young man--and his mother. It screens Wednesday at 7 p.m. and will be followed at 9:30 by Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s 1991 Oscar-nominated “Children of Nature,” a compelling contemporary fantasy involving an elderly Icelandic couple who run away from a retirement home. (323) 466-FILM.

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The charming 1918 romantic comedy “The Eyes of Julia Deep,” starring Mary Miles Minter, screens a second and final time tonight at the Silent Movie Theater, where it will be followed by the splendid 1915 Civil War drama “The Coward,” starring Charles Ray and featuring Margaret Gibson as his fiancee. Film historian Robert Birchard will discuss Gibson’s dying confession that she shot director William Desmond Taylor. Love letters written to Taylor, her frequent director, from Minter wrecked her career just as she was to turn 20, and she lived the rest of her life in seclusion.

The Silent Movie, 611 N. Fairfax Ave., West Hollywood, will mark the May 6, 1895, birth of Rudolph Valentino with three of his most famous films: “The Eagle” (1925), a sophisticated romance set in imperial Russia (May 3 and 4); “The Sheik” (1921), a creaky and exuberantly politically incorrect romantic melodrama that established Valentino as the silent era’s greatest lover (May 5 and 6), and “The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse” (1921), the classic epic, shot just before “The Sheik,” that made Valentino a star (May 8). Screenings are at 8 p.m., with an extra 1 p.m. matinee presentation of “Four Horseman.” (323) 655-2520.

Meanwhile, the El Capitan, 6838 Hollywood Blvd., will present the evergreen 1924 “Peter Pan,” with a delightful Betty Bronson in the title role Saturday at 7:30 p.m. with Dennis James performing the original score on the El Capitan’s Mighty Wurlitzer organ, which once adorned San Francisco’s Fox Theater. (800) DISNEY 6.

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The UCLA Film Archives’ Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance: Musicals from Around the World (Part II) continues Sunday with a trio of rarities: Masahiro Makino’s 1939 “Samurai Musical” at 2 p.m. and, at 7:30 p.m., two from Hungary: “State Owned Department Store” (1953) and “Singing Makes Life Beautiful” (1950). (310) 206-FILM.

Jason Phillips’ “Leftovers” premieres Thursday at 10 p.m. at the Sunset 5 (8000 Sunset Blvd.,), where it will screen Friday and Saturday at midnight. It is more talkathon than comedy, no better and no worse, than many similar films involving the various crises besetting four young guys sharing a messy old L.A. bungalow. Mark Fite, Timothy DiPri, Todd Stanton and Jason Oliver, all of whom already have substantial credits, head a capable cast. (323) 848-3500.

The Film Club at Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd., Venice, screens Saturday at 2 p.m. two views of America in the late ‘60s: “Medium Cool” (1969), Haskell Wexler’s drama set against the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago and starring Robert Forster, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s disturbing, surreal “Zabriskie Point” (1970). (310) 822-3006.