King-Size

Egypt’s immense ancient monuments and the giant Imax screen were made for each other, and Bruce Neibaur’s splendid “Mysteries of Egypt” takes full advantage of the unique format while bringing alive a fabulous long-vanished world in a most beguiling manner. Opening Friday at the California Science Center Imax Theater (Exposition Park), this National Geographic presentation finds a debonair, silver-haired Omar Sharif cast as a grandfather telling his young granddaughter (Kate Maberly) tales of ancient times as they sit in an elegant restaurant of much vintage splendor. The film is framed by a reenactment of the burial of King Tutankhamun and the eventual discovery of his tomb in 1922.

Sharif captures our imagination as well as that of Maberly as he describes what life was like in antiquity as we take a dizzying flight over the Nile, visit the pyramids of Giza, the Valley of the Kings, site of so many royal tombs, the four colossal statues of Ramses II on the facade of his temple at Abu Simbel and the vast temple at Karnak. As we are getting an idea of the scale and grandeur of these ruins as never before on the screen, Sharif stresses how amazingly advanced civilization was despite a lack of modern technology and how thepillaging of the pyramids eventually led to Egyptian royalty beingburied in unmarked tombs, which, with the exception of that of King Tutankhamun, were also eventually pillaged. In taking his leave, Sharif tells of the painstaking, ongoing process of preserving these awesome monuments as archeologists continue unlocking the “Mysteries of Egypt.” (213) 744-7400.

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If you missed “A Girl Called Rosemarie” when it screened last weekend at the Sunset 5 as part of the Laemmle Theatres’ “World Cinema 2000” series, you will have a second chance when it screens Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex (1332 2nd St., Santa Monica). During the 1950s, West Germany, in the grip of its economic miracle, was rocked by scandal when in 1957 a pretty Frankfurt party girl named Rosemarie Nitribitt, who had made many friends in very high places, was found murdered in her apartment. The first film of her story was “Rosemarie,” made the following year by director Rolf Thiele and starring sexy Nadja Tiller, and it was one of the very few German films of that era to receive international release and acclaim.

This Bernd Eichinger film, however, goes deeper. It is a crisp, brisk, eternal saga of a young woman of low status but much beauty and sex appeal who uses her body to rise in the world, but whose naivete ultimately proves greater than her ruthlessness. Nina Hoss’ memorable Rosemarie, who fashions herself as a Marilyn Monroe copy in appearance rather than demeanor, latches on to a wealthy socialite businessman, Hartog (Heiner Lauterbach), who sets her up in an apartment but regards her as socially unacceptable.

Just as hurt and anger are overtaking her, she encounters an urbane Alsace-born Frenchman, Fribert (Matthieu Carriere), who has come to Frankfurt to consummate a deal with a cartel of VIPs set up by Hartog. Fribert assures her that he’ll make it worth her while if she will seduce the members of Hartog’s cartel and tape their boudoir confidences to ensure they go through with the deal. Preoccupied with brazenly crashing high society, Rosemarie only gradually realizes that love and acceptance mean more to her than money and power; she is even slower to realize what a dangerous game she is playing.

Meanwhile, screening Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. at the Sunset 5 (8000 Sunset Blvd.) in “World Cinema 2000” is first-time Belgian director Yvan Le Moine’s intriguing but languid “The Red Dwarf,” an offbeat fable of love and redemption centering on a handsome but diminutive law clerk (Jean-Yves Thual) whose specialty is writing torrid love letters to serve as false evidence in divorce cases. His current assignment is to concoct one for the firm’s leading client (Anita Ekberg), an aging opera star eager to divorce her sixth husband, Bob (Arno Chevrier), a big, beefy gigolo. So effective is the letter that Thual’s Lucien gathers courage to try to seduce Ekberg’s Countess Paola, a full-throttle sensualist lolling about in the Art Deco splendor of her palatial estate.

A couple of drastic developments later, Lucien and Bob wind up as a clown act in a quaint traveling circus whose star is a pretty girl of 9 or 10 (Dyna Gauzy), who has as much of a crush on Lucien as he had on the countess. A circus is a sure-fire repository for pathos and for the macabre, and Thual mines them mightily. “The Red Dwarf,” which will screen Feb. 5 and 6 at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex, is arty as all get out, and it cries for an infinitely jauntier pace to keep it from teetering on the pretentious. Sunset 5: (323) 848-3500). Also at the Monica 4-Plex, Feb. 5 and 6 at 11 a.m.; (310) 394-9741.

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“The Lord’s Lantern in Budapest,” which opens a one-week run Friday at the Music Hall (9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills), finds esteemed veteran director Miklos Jancso and writer Gyula Hernadi with this series of surreal vignettes commenting on the casual deadly violence of contemporary life. These two offer their perspective of a pair of elderly survivors ofdecades of fascist and communist oppression, in the form of a pair of Budapest gravediggers (Zoltan Mucsi and Peter Scherer)--who may be terrorists or, in another moment, bankers or whatever. At one point Jancso and Hernadi wind up dead, but since they’re the director and writer, they can bring themselves back to life. “Lord’s Lantern” doesn’t travel well and becomes rapidly tedious, but there’s something bracing in discovering Jancso, nearing 80, so exuberantly throwing caution to the wind. (310) 274-6869.

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The UCLA Film Archive’s “Claude Chabrol: Innocents With Dirty Hands” continues Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater with a pair of the director’s best, “This Man Must Die” (1969) and “Le Boucher” (“The Butcher”) (1970), both featuring the stocky character actor Jean Yanne. In the first, based on a Nicholas Blake thriller, a man (Michel Duchaussoy), in his obsession to the find the hit-and-run driver who killed his son, becomes involved with a woman (Caroline Celier) whose brother-in-law (Yanne) is his key suspect. That the brother-in-law proves to be a monster only adds to the moral and psychological complexity of this darkly fascinating film.

As usual, Chabrol, in “Le Boucher,” works within the form of the suspense thriller. Like “This Man Must Die,” this film takes place in a splendid rural setting. A quaint town is struck by a series of grisly murders, and Chabrol plays the ironic contrast between these heinous crimes and this most beautiful of pastoral backgrounds and its friendly, kindly inhabitants for all it’s worth. In the foreground are the chic Parisian headmistress of the local grammar school, Mlle. Helene (Stephane Audran), and the kindly town butcher, Popaul (Jean Yanne), just returned after a long absence to take over his father’s business.

We almost forget about the first murder--the victim was a young woman--as Chabrol concentrates on the developing relationship between these two solitary people. Just as these two approach a moment of truth in their relationship, the unknown murderer strikes again and tension mounts. Can it be possible so patently good a man as the butcher also can be a maniacal killer? Or is it just as possible Helene’s repression has taken a perverse turn? Or is it someone else, whose lethal rampage will somehow threaten this couple?

So simple yet so profound, “Le Boucher” is a picture tough to discuss without giving it away, but it can be said Chabrol is mainly concerned with the dualism of human nature--its capacity for good and evil--and the paradox of love with its power to destroy as well as redeem.

“Cop au Vin,” a.k.a. “Poulet au Vinaigre” (“Chicken in Vinegar”) (1985), and its sequel, “Inspector Lavardin” (1988)--screening Saturday at 7:30 p.m.--are vintage Chabrol, expressing his mordant, witty view of the more lethal aspects of human nature. “Cop au Vin” proceeds with delicious unpredictability. At first, it seems to be a David-and-Goliath tale: A small-town widow (Stephane Audran), confined to a wheelchair, battles to hold on to her old house against the local attorney (Michel Bouquet), physician (Jean Topart) and butcher (Jean-Claude Bouillaud), who are intent on developing her property. Murder, however, strikes from out of left field. What’s more, far from being sympathetic, the widow, played with great elan by Audran, is a crazed harridan intent on ruining the life of her young son (Lucas Belvaux), a postman. This youth is the film’s key character, the person who must get free not only of his mother but from the bourgeois hypocrisy of the men so eager to grab his mother’s property. Also involved are Caroline Celier as milquetoast-ish Bouquet’s glamorous wife and Jean Poiret, who plays a shrewd, tough cop.

So successful was this film that Chabrol brought back Poiret in the title role in “Inspector Lavardin.” This time Lavardin arrives in a similarly provincial community where the paunchy nude corpse of a rich, pious writer (Jacques Dacomme) is found face down on some rocks by the sea. Someone has scrawled across his back in lipstick the word porc (pig), presumably the same person who stabbed him to death. Arriving at the writer’s large, handsome Second Empire country estate, Lavardin is met by the writer’s chic, glamorous widow (Bernadette Lafont), who unexpectedly turns out to be a lover of his from some two decades earlier. She makes no pretense at grief, freely informs him that it was strictly a marriage of convenience. Taking the same open attitude is her gay brother (Jean-Claude Brialy), who regards his late brother-in-law’s books as a more effective remedy for insomnia than sleeping pills. Clues are few, but the inspector is intrigued to discover hidden in a fine Napoleonic desk the phone number of the local discotheque’s smooth, insinuating proprietor (Jean-Luc Bideau).

Anybody with even a passing familiarity with Chabrol’s work knows his abiding passion is exposing the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, but this time he and co-writer Dominique Roulet (who also collaborated with him on “Cop au Vin”) suggest with Machiavellian glee how sweet the uses of that hypocrisy can be--how someone as subtle and perceptive as Lavardin can make hypocrisy serve his own--and, ironically, just--purposes. Chabrol is content to let his film unfold without undue flourishes only to finish with stinging, in-your-face bravura. Chabrol’s throwaway confidence is well matched by that of his stars. (310) 206-FILM.