A Tale Infused With Musical Grace

Owsley Brown’s graceful “Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles,” which opens Friday at downtown L.A.’s Grande 4-Plex, 345 S. Figueroa St., reminds us that Bowles devoted the first half of his artistic career to composing music before settling in Tangier in 1947 to become the celebrated writer of “The Sheltering Sky” and other works. Frail but witty and alert, Bowles recalls the lesser-known part of his career as we hear various selections of his compositions accompanied by some wonderful vintage footage of New York street life. The film’s final selection, which gives the movie its title, is accompanied by surreal images of nighttime Tangier; completed in 1949, it is one of Bowles’ last compositions.

Bowles speaks of his isolated childhood giving him a taste for solitude that nurtured his love of composing and writing, striving for simplicity in both. His neighbor, composer Phillip Ramey, however, points out that while Bowles’ writing can be grim, horrific and fantastic, his composing is marked by charm. This loving portrait of a civil man is also a final portrait of the artist, for Bowles died shortly after its completion in November 1999. (213) 612-0268.

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The Laemmle Theaters are presenting two films that are portraits of mother love at its most determined. Abdoulaye Ascofare’s “Faraw! Mother of the Dunes” is as beautiful as it is harsh, a story of a feisty, indomitable tribal woman (Aminata Ousmane) in the Republic of Mali whose husband has been destroyed mentally and physically while imprisoned on a trumped-up charge. Her challenge is brutally simple: how to keep her family from starving. She is sustained in an unshakable faith in God--and an ingenious imagination.

Inspired by the life of her own mother, Ascofare displays a striking visual sense that allows the harsh Sahara setting of her film to take on an implicit symbolic impact. “Faraw!,” the final offering in the World Cinema 2001 series, screens Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. at the Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 848-3500; and on Sept. 29 and 30 at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741.

By contrast, Yao Shougang’s “The Outcast,” which screens Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex as part of a Celebration of the Chinese Cinema series, takes even stronger material but undercuts it with heart-tugging melodramatics. Chi Peng stars as a teenage peasant determined to raise the infant son of her widowed young father, who faces imprisonment at the height of the Cultural Revolution. She is instantly reduced to an outcast, with worse in store for her. This is the kind of picture that wrings its hands over how bad conditions used to be instead of dealing with how repressive China remains. The film screens Sept. 29 and 30 at 11 a.m. at the Playhouse 7, 673 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 844-6500.

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Sheila Laffey and Leslie Purcell’s urgent “The Last Stand: The Struggle for the Ballona Wetlands,” which illuminates the complicated struggle to preserve one of California’s last surviving wetlands, screens Sunday at 6 p.m. at the Theater Palisades, 941 Temescal Canyon, Pacific Palisades, as part of its weekly Pacific Film Festival series. The film asserts that if thorough soil, drainage and all-around environmental impact studies had been made at the outset, Playa Vista might well have never made it off the drawing boards. Accompanied by the filmmakers’ short update, “Ballona Wetlands: The Ongoing Struggle, 2000-2001.” (310) 453-4272.

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Rosa von Praunheim, a pioneer in international gay cinema, will present his superb 90-minute documentary “Fassbinder’s Women: The Willing Victims of Rainer Werner Fassbinder” Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Goethe Institute, Suite 100, 5750 Wilshire Blvd. On Sept. 27 he will present his 1999 “The Einstein of Sex: The Life and Work of Dr. M. Hirschfeld.”

A compelling group portrait of the late enfant terrible of the New German Cinema, “Fassbinder’s Women” brings back vivid memories of the mostly remarkable 43 films Fassbinder made between 1969 until his drug-related death at 37 in 1982. Surely it should make those unfamiliar with Fassbinder eager to see what they missed. Praunheim got most of Fassbinder’s key actresses and female associates to speak freely, and he also receives valuable insights from such male colleagues as cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and actors Peer Raben and Harry Baer.

It would seem that with the exception of favorites Hanna Schygulla and Eva Mattes, Fassbinder, who grew up unloved and largely apart from his family, unleashed a sadistic streak on almost everyone else. Fassbinder was a stocky, unhandsome homosexual who could be incredibly charming to men and women alike. The women, mostly all strong from the start, withstood his cruelty, learned from him and have continued their careers successfully. Both the beautiful Schygulla and Brigitta Mira, the now 90, still-vibrant star of Fassbinder’s finest film, “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,” feel they could have gone on to greater acclaim had Fassbinder lived. These women view Fassbinder with clear eyes but abiding love and gratitude. On the other hand, Fassbinder succeeded in driving two of his most significant male lovers to suicide. (323) 525-3388.

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For the record: “Sorority Girls’ Revenge,” a hopelessly amateurish comedy about some sorority pledges imprisoning a pair of peeping toms, opens at selected theaters today.

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John Waters and Divine, his hefty drag queen muse, followed up their landmark “exercise in poor taste” “Pink Flamingos” with “Female Trouble” (1975), which is neither quite so extreme nor as consistently funny as the earlier film but is at once more serious and ambitious.

“Female Trouble” chronicles the lurid life of Dawn Davenport (Divine) from high school dropout to notorious convicted murderess. As usual, Waters views low-class taste and the hypocritical distortions of conventional mores with a highly developed sense of the absurd, but unlike “Pink Flamingos,” “Female Trouble” at times is quite brutal. Waters will discuss the film, newly released on DVD, with this writer after its American Cinematheque screening Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 466-FILM.