Sometimes, the World Gets in the Way

Over the last decade, the Taiwanese cinema has emerged as one of the most provocative and challenging in the world, yet its films don’t receive regular U.S. theatrical release, with the recent “Yi Yi” a rare exception. This is what makes the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “A Hou Hsiao-hsien Retrospective” so important. Hou is the most renowned of Taiwan’s top filmmakers, and LACMA is providing a unique opportunity to see seven of his films, starting Friday at 7:30 p.m. with his semiautobiographical “A Time to Live and a Time to Die” (1985), a beautiful account of a boy, Ah-ha-gu (You An-shun), coming of age in a small town in Taiwan in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.

Ah-ha-gu’s father, an educator, had always thought he would return to mainland China. The Communist Revolution changed the family’s plans, as it did for countless others. Although the film is permeated with a sense of displacement, its key focus is on how family ties are tested by the untimely deaths of the parents of Ah-ha-gu, who has an older brother and sister and two younger brothers and an elderly grandmother. The death of one parent threatens the family with disintegration; the second brings it together, just as Ah-ha-gu is drifting into gang activity. Even so, Hou conveys a sense that his leisurely account is an elegy to the passing of a traditional family solidarity that allows its members moments of happiness and pleasure despite hardship and loss.

In “The Puppetmaster” (1993), which screens Saturday at 7:30 p.m., Hou evokes the turbulent history of Taiwan through the life of puppet master Li Tien-lu (1909-1998), who endured both a harsh family life under an abusive stepmother and the vicissitudes of Japanese occupation and its censorship policies to carry on his family tradition to such acclaim that, by the time of his death, Li had been declared a national treasure and had toured the world. Hou’s dramatization of the life of Li, who serves as the film’s narrator and is seen on camera briefly, is vivid, but “The Puppetmaster” is not nearly as accessible--nor as consistently subtitled in English--as “A Time to Live and a Time to Die.” LACMA, Bing Theater, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6010.

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The American Cinematheque’s annual Recent Spanish Cinema series continues Thursday at the Egyptian, with its ongoing tribute to Catalan director Ventura Pons represented by “Actresses” (1997), which the Cinematheque first screened in 1998 and is presenting again tonight at 9:30.

Pons’ stylish, theatrical--in the best sense--film offers tour de force portrayals by four vibrant Barcelona actresses. A young actress (Merce Pons), up for a role in a play about a legendary actress, interviews three middle-aged women who studied with her. One (Nuria Espert) is a grande dame of the theater, another is a popular TV comedian (Rosa Maria Sarda) and the third (Anna Lizaran) is a respected film and TV dubbing actress-director. “Actresses” delves deep into what it is to be a woman as well as an actress, as Pons gradually uncovers how an incident in the three women’s student days affected their entire lives.

Unavailable for preview but arriving with good advance notice are Jose Luis Carci’s “You’re the One--A Story of the Past” (Friday at 7 p.m.), a homage to ‘40s Hollywood melodrama, and Mariano Barroso’s “Kasbah” (Friday at 9:30 p.m.), a road movie thriller set in Morocco. Daniel Calparsoro, whose “Jump Into the Void” was a highlight of the 1996 series, returns with “Asfalto” (Saturday at 8:30 p.m.), which also stars the memorably intense Najwa Nimri as a thrill-seeker caught up in sex and crime with a pair of petty thieves. (323) 466-FILM.

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The Laemmle Theaters’ current Documentary Days cycle continues with “The Charcoal People,” an eloquent expose of the plight of the impoverished men and women in Brazil who spend their lives laying waste to forests for the wood to convert into charcoal needed for the manufacturing of pig iron. Through a combination of economic and geographic shifts over the years, this hard labor has become increasingly low-paying, at the same time forcing families to become permanent migrants in search of work.

Oscar-winning director Nigel Noble and writer-producer Jose Padilha have proceeded imaginatively, chronicling ecological catastrophes as well as the futile existence of the illiterate workers who know no other trade. In the course of the picture, the filmmakers introduce us to a lean, wiry 76-year-old man, a hard worker still but on the verge of quitting after a lifetime’s work, trusting in God to take care of him. We then meet a longtime maker of kilns and a young family man forced to pull up stakes, fired simply because he dared to ask for a raise, and a 9-year-old boy who earns $2 a day covering two large kilns with clay.

“The Charcoal People” concludes on an ominous note, not only for human rights issues but also for the endangerment of the planet’s ecology, for it shows us that the charcoal workers have depleted central Brazil, chopping away at the Amazon rain forest. As a parting shot, the filmmakers report that the United States represents 70% of Brazil’s pig iron market. “The Charcoal People” screens Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. at the Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500; and March 10 and 11 at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, (310) 395-9741.

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Among the films screening in the UCLA Film Archives’ Contemporary Latin American Films is Jose Marques’ “----land,” its title a bit of unprintable wordplay involving its setting in the Falkland Islands (James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, Saturday, following the 7:30 p.m. screening of the 74-minute “I Won’t Go Back Home”). The film is of primary interest as the first Dogma 95 film from Latin America. It is, in fact, a “mockumentary” in which Argentine actor Fabian Stratas takes a one-week trip to the Falkland Islands, which only recently started permitting Argentines to travel there.

Declaring himself a magician and carrying a hidden camera, the dry-witted Stratas explains that his mission is to impregnate as many Falkland women as possible so as to repopulate the islands with Argentines. Actually, Marques and Stratas have something else in mind: to reveal the magician as a typical condescending, womanizing Argentine boor.

What we glimpse of the Falklands through the film’s relentlessly wavering hand-held cameras--the film was actually shot by two others as well as Stratas--is a bland, raw-looking bit of old England displaced to the Antipodes and populated by polite and friendly people who do not change their demeanor one whit when they learn Stratas’ nationality. Stratas does encounter an array of attractive young women; the one he zeros in on, Camilla, is in fact played by a professional actress from the U.K., Camilla Heaney.

Whatever conviction the film possesses lies in Heaney’s ability to play a pretty but unglamorous local woman who allows herself to be charmed by Stratas. The trouble is that it’s hard to accept that Heaney succumbs to a man with so little evident charm, and even then, apparently, only to put him down unmercifully. The film is not without its quirky moments and mordant humor, but on the whole it’s too obviously a contrivance to be persuasive.

In addition to “I Won’t Go Back,” in which two Argentine families at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum are linked by an act of violence, “Te Amo” (“Made in Chile”), a coming-of-age story, screens tonight at 7:30. (310) 206-FILM.