Iran through a pitiless lens

Jafar PANAHI’S terse and devastating “Crimson Gold,” a film that explores the deep chasm between the haves and have-nots in Iran, kicks off the UCLA Film Archive’s 14th annual Celebration of Iranian Cinema, a major event in the alternative film world.

The film opens with a rapid, fragmented glimpse of a Tehran jewelry store holdup and abruptly flashes back to introduce us to a massive, paunchy young man, Hussein (Hossain Emadeddin), a pizza delivery man who is engaged to be married.

He is a calm, patient gentle giant, but with a documentarian-like tenacity. Panahi follows him on his rounds in the traffic-jammed city, revealing that he is routinely subjected to unthinking and gratuitous assaults on his dignity. By evening Hussein is summoned to a penthouse of such vastness and nouveau riche opulence that its counterparts in the Wilshire Corridor or Manhattan’s Trump Tower would be hard-put to compete.

Its occupant, Pourang (Pourang Nakhael), the son of the condo’s absent owners, is in a snit over his girlfriend’s abrupt departure and is eager for an audience for his self-absorbed woes. Aided by drink, Hussein literally reels at experiencing lavishness beyond his imagining; in addition to a roof garden overlooking Tehran, there is even a large indoor swimming pool.

Best known for “The Circle,” his bold and controversial attack on the oppression of Iranian women, Panahi works from a script by his mentor, the great filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.

Ali Reza Amini’s “Letters in the Wind” is a surprisingly lyrical and affecting film -- surprising because it is set in a boot camp in the snowy mountains above Tehran, a place of depersonalizing harshness. Yet Amini is able to find in the ordeal of the conscripts, most drawn from the remotest regions of Iran, a source of rueful humor -- and in one of the soldier’s tape recorders, an unexpected source of uplift and connection to the outside world. “Letters in the Wind” has a deceptive simplicity and subtlety: The film is so well wrought that it is more touching than one would imagine possible.

Asian icon

UCLA Film Archive’s other ongoing series, Rediscovering Anna May Wong, on Sunday will screen one of its splendid restorations: “Toll of the Sea,” a 1922 variation on “Madame Butterfly” directed by Chester M. Franklin. It features a delicately hued two-strip Technicolor that is as exquisite as Wong, in her first starring role, cast opposite Kenneth Harlan as an American version of Lt. Pinkerton. “Toll of the Sea” will be followed by an even greater rarity, “Pavement Butterfly” (1928), a melodrama that casts Wong as a circus acrobat wrongly blamed for murder. It was her second film for director Richard Eichberg, made during Wong’s sojourn in Germany, where she sought roles that reached beyond Asian stereotypes. (It was at this period that a glamorous Wong was photographed flanked by Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl, a shot that has become a famous still.)

A life in free fall

Embedded in the decadent downtown Manhattan club scene he did so much to create and promote in the ‘80s, Michael Alig (Macauley Culkin), the focus of “Party Monster,” is at heart yet another young and effeminate gay Midwesterner who came to Manhattan with no particular job skills or connections. Unlike others, however, he possessed the drive and imagination to become “fabulous.”

Unfortunately for him, the raucous, glittery scene he created as a defense against a hostile world was fueled by a mind-boggling cornucopia of drugs, which meant Alig’s rapid ascent also launched his descent. For the bold and engrossing “Party Monster,” which is not for the squeamish, filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato drew from their documentary of the same name, which charted the rise and fall of Alig.

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Screenings

UCLA Film and Television Archive

14th Annual Celebration of Iranian Cinema: “Crimson Gold,” Friday, 7:30 p.m.; “Letters in the Wind,” Saturday, 7:30 p.m.

Rediscovering Anna May Wong series: “Toll of the Sea,” Sunday,

7 p.m., followed by “Pavement Butterfly.”

Where: James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, UCLA campus, Westwood.

Info: (310) 206-FILM

Also

“Party Monster,” today,

7:30 p.m., followed by “Velvet Goldmine.”

Where: New Beverly Cinema,

7165 Beverly Blvd., L.A.

Info: (323) 938-4038