Thoughts on ‘Love, etc.’

The French hold the patent for telling love stories with panache. They take love seriously but treat it tersely, with an adult, knowing humor and compassion.

Marion Lenoux’s “Love, etc.” is a perfect example, a contemporary take on the eternal triangle that actually seems fresh and alert. Charlotte Gainsbourg won a Cesar for her portrayal of an attractive 25-year-old Paris painting restorer who resorts to the personals to find a man she can love and respect. Responding to the ad is Pierre (Yvan Attal) a 30-something banker, expert in foreign currency but so shy and luckless with women that he encloses a picture of his best friend, Benoit (Charles Berling), an impassioned literature professor and skilled ladies’ man.

Gainsbourg’s Marie, however, is instantly taken with Pierre and in no time has him marching up the aisle with her. They are blissfully happy, with Pierre confiding in Benoit that his bride is the princess who kissed the frog--”Only I didn’t turn into a prince; she likes me as a frog.” Actually, Pierre is a pleasant-looking man, and many would think him better looking than Benoit, whose effectiveness lies in his rock-ribbed self-confidence. The trouble is that one day, out of the blue, Benoit realizes he is head over heels in love with his best friend’s wife.

In adapting Julian Barnes’ novel “Talking It Over,” “Love, etc.” takes some unexpected twists and turns, and the point at which we take leave of this trio suggests that the ways in which men and women will be working out their relationships in the new millennium will be different from the last one. “Love, etc.” screens at the Sunset 5 from Saturday through Monday only, 10 a.m., and at the Monica 4-Plex on Jan. 22 and 23 only, at 11 a.m. Sunset 5: (323) 848-3500; Monica 4-Plex: (310) 394-9741.

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Parris Patton’s “Creature,” which begins a Friday and Saturday midnight run at the Sunset 5, is one of the most striking films to emerge from Outfest ’99. A minuscule budget proved a crucial plus for the documentarian, for the four years it took to make “Creature” enable us to see Kyle Dean’s transformation from Hollywood club drag performer to pre-op transsexual; it also allows his rural, religious North Carolina parents to become accustomed to their son becoming a beautiful daughter, Stacey. This territory has been covered before, but rarely with such perception, clarity and detachment.

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Max Farberbock’s “Aimee and Jaguar,” Germany’s official Oscar entry and a Golden Globe nominee, will be presented by the Goethe Institute on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at Sony’s Ince Theater Screening Room in Culver City. Although conventional in style, the film, set in World War II Berlin, tells the true story of a singularly improbable yet passionate love affair, between a Jewish lesbian, working under an assumed name as the indispensable assistant to the editor of a Nazi newspaper, and a German soldier’s seemingly conventional wife, honored by Hitler for having borne four children. Juliane Kohler as Lilly Wust and Maria Schrader as the fearless Felice Schragenheim give remarkable portrayals in roles rich in depth and complexity. Wust, now in her 80s, and various members of the film’s cast and crew are scheduled to appear. As seating is limited, reservations are a must: (323) 525-3388.

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The Nuart’s “The Madness of Ken Russell” offers three double features from the British master of excess Friday through next Thursday, opening with one of Russell’s lesser-known but most rewarding works, “The Music Lovers” (1971).

Russell’s dazzling film of the life of Tchaikovsky is daring in the best sense: Russell asks us to yield totally to its exuberant romanticism, its soaring flights of fancy and its plummetings to darkest despair--and therefore to embrace its clutch of willful characters who lead lives of incredible emotional extravagance. In short, “The Music Lovers” is a fervent expression of the old belief that to achieve the sublime is to risk the ridiculous. Indeed, the film itself allows no middle ground in response: If you don’t find it in some ways sublime, you are almost certain to find it in many ways ridiculous.

What makes this ambitious film succeed for some is the way Russell and writer Melvyn Bragg use Tchaikovsky’s story to portray the plight of the artist. He is victimized by everyone who cannot distinguish the man with his varied failings from his triumphant art--an art, alas, that can redeem only him, yet take a terrible toll on others.

Anyhow, the way they tell it, Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) was a homosexual whose determination to be straight wreaked havoc not only on himself but virtually everybody he became involved with; the primary victims, not surprisingly, were the two women in his life, both given to intense fantasizing. They are the raw, awkward country girl Nina (Glenda Jackson), whom he marries, and his patroness, the rich and reclusive Mme. Von Meck (Izabella Telezynska), so enamored by him and his music that she dares not actually meet him.

Although Tchaikovsky rants and raves as much as the ladies himself, he remains essentially passive, sticking to his art no matter what. Throughout, he remains an enigma: We are never sure how much he cares about others, except for his mother, who died a horrible death when he was a child, and his devoted sister (Sabina Maydelle). As Tchaikovsky, Chamberlain is a convincingly tortured spirit, but it is Jackson who dominates, as apparently was intended. Indeed, in the end the movie is almost her story--the story of a girl destroyed by her dreams, progressing from irrepressible youth to hideous dementia.

“The Music Lovers” ends on a note of paradox: Life was hell for Tchaikovsky--and his very existence made it so for others--but would he have been inspired to create all that music otherwise? It screens Friday through Sunday with “Women in Love” (1969), Russell’s film from the D.H. Lawrence novel that is arguably the director’s most accomplished work.An unrated director’s cut of the ultra-kinky “Crimes of Passion” (1984) and “The Devils,” which unleashes hysteria in a 17th century French convent, screen Monday and Tuesday, and “Tommy” (1975), Russell’s lurid filming of the Who’s rock opera, screens Wednesday and Thursday, along with “The Lair of the White Worm,” based on Bram Stoker’s final novel.

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The second weekend in LACMA’s “Here’s Looking at You, Bogie” retrospective brings “Casablanca” (1942) and “Key Largo” (1948) Friday at 7:30 p.m. and a Howard Hawks-directed double feature, “The Big Sleep” (1946) and “To Have and Have Not” (1944). William Faulkner helped adapt Raymond Chandler and Ernest Hemingway’s novels to the screen, and both films team Bogart with the sultry fledgling actress who became his wife and a durable star in her own right, Lauren Bacall. “To Have and Have Not” marked Bacall’s screen debut, and is famous for Bacall’s suggestive instructions to Bogart on how to whistle.

There’s a famous Hollywood anecdote about how director Hawks and writers Faulkner, Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, couldn’t figure out whodunit in “The Big Sleep.” Chandler proved no help. But the convoluted plot exists primarily to bring together a mythic couple, Bogart as the incorruptible, plain-talking private eye Philip Marlowe and an insinuating Lauren Bacall as a lady in more distress than she cares to admit. Their chemistry still crackles. Don’t expect the vintage L.A. atmosphere that permeates Chandler’s novel, however. “The Big Sleep” was shot virtually entirely on sets. (323) 857-6010.