Wait for Godard? It’s worth it

AFI FEST 2004, which has a notably diverse selection this year, has scored a coup with Jean-Luc Godard’s “Notre Musique,” a challenging meditation on war and the roles that words and images play in it. Divided into three parts -- the Kingdom of Hell, the Kingdom of Purgatory and the Kingdom of Heaven -- the film opens with a stunning collage of clips from old movies depicting warfare over the last several centuries.

Purgatory finds Godard traveling to Sarajevo for a Literary Encounters forum, something he actually did, and he interweaves actual personages and fictional characters. They raise complex political and moral questions about the state of the world and the human condition. There is the sense that Godard may be suggesting that while language divides, images have the potential to unite.

Among the forum’s participants is Olga (Nade Dieu), a Jew of Russian descent who calmly accepts being overtaken by a despair that connects directly to the final sequence, Heaven, which Godard envisions as a Garden of Eden -- but fenced in and guarded by Marines.

That “Notre Musique” seems the most accessible film from Godard in some time doesn’t mean that it requires any less thought or repeated viewings to grasp all he has on his mind and in his heart.

A familiar Bacon

With Nicole Kassell’s harrowing “The Woodsman,” Kevin Bacon reveals the same masterful ability at portraying a man struggling to maintain his self-control that he brought to his Oscar-nominated performance in “Mystic River.” Here he plays one of the toughest roles an actor can have: a child molester. Yet Bacon manages to earn sympathy for his Walter, freshly released from prison after serving a 12-year-sentence for molesting two little girls. (For the record, Stuart Whitman splendidly played a nearly identical role in Guy Green’s 1961 “The Mark.”) Filled with remorse and self-loathing, and undergoing therapy, Walter tries to rebuild his life, coping with both inner pressures and a hostile world.

Luckily, at work he meets a woman (Kyra Sedgwick) with her own troubled past who senses good in him, but it’s a challenge to him to trust himself, let alone her. Kassell wisely keeps things simple and in perspective in depicting Walter’s struggle.

Target-happy

The German film “Soundless” is a sleek and satisfying romantic thriller smartly directed by Mennan Yapo from Lars-Olav Beier’s endlessly inventive script.

Joachim Krol is ideally cast as a professional assassin in his 40s who is blessed with nondescript features. On an assignment he sees no reason to eliminate a sleeping blond (Nadja Uhl) as well as his target. He’s reluctant to admit he’s done so because he is struck by her beauty, and in no time he has most inconveniently fallen in love with her. Much suspense, many complications follow, all of which are pleasingly persuasive.

Farewell to Lamarr

George Misch’s “Calling Hedy Lamarr” is a poignant tribute to a captivating person on screen and off. Proclaimed as the most beautiful woman in the world, the Viennese-born Lamarr created a scandal for her nude swimming scenes in Gustav Machaty’s “Ecstasy” in 1933. She soon became an MGM star, but her career faded along with Hollywood’s Golden Era.

The key figure in this documentary is the actress’ son Anthony Loder. The Lamarr that emerges from the observations of Loder, his sister Denise and several of her friends is that of a woman full of contradictions, a distant mother preoccupied with her career but who found supportive friends and a measure of contentment in her quiet final years in Florida.

Yet Lamarr was not merely a beauty. She came up with an idea for a device to protect U.S. radio-guided torpedoes from enemy attempts to jam them. And in 1942, composer George Antheil helped her develop and patent -- yet neither profited from -- a frequency-switching system that remains the basis for many high-tech systems, including the wireless phones that Loder sells in his store today.

Off the tracks

Nimrod Antal’s gritty, assured “Kontroll,” filmed entirely in Budapest’s subway system, is primarily a character study of a scruffy young man (Sandor Csanyi) who has dropped out to become a metro ticket taker, a job that invites scorn by many riders. The ticket taker finds that he has slipped into a literal limbo; the question is whether he will be able to break free of it.

The question in Polish filmmaker Konrad Niewolski’s even bleaker yet provocative prison drama “Symmetry” is whether a young man (Arek Detmer), wrongly convicted for assault, will win release before life behind bars corrupts him.

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AFI Fest

Selected screenings

* “Notre Musique,” 4 p.m. Saturday; 9:30 p.m. Nov. 12

* “The Woodsman,” 7 p.m. Friday

* “Soundless,” 9:45 p.m. Tuesday; 4 p.m. next Thursday

* “Calling Hedy Lamarr,” 3:30 p.m. Saturday; 9:45 p.m. Wednesday

* “Kontroll,” 9:45 p.m. Sunday; noon Tuesday

* “Symmetry,” 7 p.m. Friday; 2:30 p.m. Saturday

Where: ArcLight, 6360 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood

Info: (866) AFI-FEST or www.afifest.com