Chile’s ‘Taxi para Tres’ Is a Darkly Comic Journey

Orlando Lubbert’s dark, stinging Chilean comedy, “Taxi para Tres” (Taxi for Three), continues the UCLA Film Archives’ “Contemporary Latin American Films” series Saturday in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater. Screening at 7:30 p.m., “Taxi” stars Alejandro Trejo as a hard-pressed cabdriver whose life is upturned when he picks up a pair of muggers, raspy-voiced, knife-wielding Chavelo (Daniel Munoz) and his dimwitted novice accomplice, Coto (Fernando Gomez-Rovira), who packs a hammer. Chavelo, a gleeful sociopath, gives Trejo’s Ulises a choice: “Steering wheel or trunk.”

Ulises decides he’s better off behind the wheel of the cab he’s still paying for and thus observes these goons in action. But when the two surprisingly manage to pull off a lucrative robbery, Chavelo takes Ulises by surprise by insisting their driver get a cut. Ulises refuses initially, but when Chavelo forces the money on him, the cabby is seduced. If a modest sum of money can ease the burden of supporting a sizable family....

Lubbert pulls no punches, and the film packs a wallop at the finish. “Taxi para Tres” clearly struck a nerve on home ground, where it was a substantial hit and also took the top prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival.

Screening Sunday at 7 p.m. in the series is the West Coast premiere of Lourdes Portillo’s “Senorita Extraviada,” which documents with a devastating low-key persistence all the conditions that have allowed it to be said of Ciudad Juarez that “there is no better place in the world to kill a young woman.”

Since the mid-’90s some 230 teenagers and young women have been murdered, and no one ever seems to be brought to justice.

The reasons why Juarez has become so dangerous for young women are several. The two key factors are that the city is the key point of entry for drugs into the U.S. and that the implementation of the NAFTA accords has accelerated greatly its industrialization. About 80% of the assembly factories are American owned, and they employ 185,000 workers, mainly young women--many of them from rural areas all over Mexico, all of them willing to work long hours for $4 or $5 a day, to a large extent displacing the male work force. Thus, a large population of poor, unsophisticated young women is at the mercy of a city in which corruption of the police and local government is painfully obvious and in which there are many out-of-work men.

Ineptitude and machismo coalesce at every level of the bureaucracy, and one activist is surely correct when she holds the entire government of Mexico responsible for the dire fates of so many young women. Chillingly, Portillo informs us that 50 women were killed in the 18 months it took her to make her film, yet she leaves us with a ray of hope as families of the victims have become organized and increasingly vocal in their demand for justice. (310) 466-Film.

*

Meanwhile, the American Cinematheque’s “Recent Spanish Cinema” continues at the Egyptian. Screening Friday at 7:30 p.m. is Carlos Molinero’s “Salvajes” (Savages), a lurid, overheated yet potent and entertaining melodrama calling attention to the plight of illegal immigrants from North Africa in Valencia, the port of their arrival.

Molinero is fortunate in having as his stars two of Spanish cinema’s biggest names, Marisa Paredes and Imanoel Arias. Paredes plays Berta, a middle-aged but still chic and attractive nurse in a neighborhood clinic.

Berta has lovingly raised her two nephews and niece, orphaned 10 years earlier, but hasn’t noticed how far they have strayed from being the little angels that she took into her home. (The Nazi posters and flags that cover the walls of the bedroom of her younger nephew, Raul [Alberto Ferreiro], might have given her a clue.)

Anyway, Raul has in fact become a skinhead intent on harassing and beating up immigrants while his surly older brother, Guillermo (Roger Casamajor), works with a ruthless smuggler of these same illegal aliens.

The smuggler Fausto (Jose Luis Alcobendas) in turn has captivated their drug-abusing sister, Lucia (Maria Isasi). Berta, who likes to go out on the town, encounters in a bar Arias’ Eduardo, a tough, middle-aged cop she treated earlier for his bad liver; they click in an instant. However, an especially brutal beating of a black man will find Eduardo knocking at Berta’s front door.

“Salvajes” is highly combustible, loaded with dizzying hand-held shots, but it all works, thanks to the skill of Paredes and Arias. They can sustain all the fireworks, both between Berta and Eduardo and in relation to the wayward nephews.

Among the various other films screening is Judith Colell’s “Nosotras” (tonight at 9:30), an acridly amusing and lively if familiar account of all the troubles a wide variety of women have with men, sometimes of their own making. The key strand among seven interwoven stories involves a middle-aged housewife (Mercedes Sampietro) married to a wealthy but astonishingly miserly man who keeps her on such a tight budget she must do all the housework in their large luxury home and make--and remake--her own clothes. Why does she put up with the jerk? The reason is the shame she would feel if those who know her found out how horrible her life really is.

Other vignettes are typical, including one about a factory worker who strives to buy a pair of expensive Nikes her spoiled son craves. “Nosotras” is well-made but conventional. (323) 466-FILM.

*

“Sons of Hercules” muscles into Outfest’s weekly Wednesday 7:30 p.m. screenings at the Village at the Ed Gould Plaza, 1125 N. McCadden Place. It’s composed of clips from more than 70 campy, mainly Italian-made, primitively dubbed spear-and-sandal epics of the ‘50s and ‘60s that starred scantily clad bodybuilders.

Curators William Comstock and John Kirk have lined up some of the best-known of the musclemen to appear in person: Mickey Hargitay, Richard Harrison and Gordon Mitchell. (323) 960-2394.