In film, Spain is hot

By Robert Abele

March 15, 2007 12 AM PT

Special to The Times

WITH the box-office and artistic success of “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Volver,” there’s probably no better time for the American Cinematheque to bring out its Recent Spanish Cinema XIII. Among the offerings is the most expensive movie Spain has produced, “Alatriste,” an epic -- and plodding -- fusion of Arturo Perez-Reverte’s historical novels revolving around a 17th century soldier (Viggo Mortensen, bringing his soberly sexy mumble to a Romance language) enmeshed in the court intrigue of Spain’s declining empire. Faring better is the fragmented mystery “Celia’s Lives,” director Antonio Chavarrias’ modern tale of the many people in a family of sisters connected to a murdered teenage girl.

The real standout is first time writer-director Daniel Sanchez Arevalo’s “DarkBlueAlmostBlack,” a moving story of family, fate and emotional prison -- literally and figuratively: One main character is a female inmate hoping to get pregnant so she can live out her term in the maternity ward; the other is a young man whose life is consumed with caring for his infirm father. The film has the gentle shock/charm and emotional generosity of later Almodovar.

Life on a kibbutz

The Israel Film Festival continues for another week, which means there are still chances to see some of the highlighted entries, including the much-talked-about documentary “Withdrawal From Gaza,” chronicling the uprooting of more than 8,000 Jews from West Bank and Gaza Strip settlements two years ago. There’s also “Aviva, My Love,” the modestly affecting drama about a working mother’s efforts to become a published writer that swept last year’s Israeli Academy Awards.

Not to be missed is “Sweet Mud,” a bitterly funny and poignant coming-of-age story about the friction between personal happiness and stringent rules of equality on a kibbutz in the 1970s. Twelve-year-old Dvir (Tomer Steinhof) is in the unenviable position of having to juggle intensive bar mitzvah preparation with the needs of his single, mentally fragile mother (Ronit Yudkevitz), whose behavior is at odds with the kibbutz’s strict rules. Although not the sunniest portrait of Israel’s popular collective system -- didacts, autocrats and the self-serving fairly surround the characters -- writer-director Dror Shaul shows a flair for navigating moods, including raucous humor, romance and the inevitable tension involved in trying to achieve something graceful and perhaps impossibly utopian.

Embittered veteran

The hard reality of war and its aftermath is the subject of Kazuo Hara’s coarse, disturbing 1987 film “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On,” being shown Sunday by Los Angeles Filmforum as part of a retrospective of this transgressive-minded Japanese documentarian’s work. Hara’s subject -- an embittered, violent-minded World War II veteran and radical activist named Kenzo Okuzaki -- is not going quietly into the night as the 40-year anniversary of Japan’s surrender approaches. He’s spent time in prison for killing a man, has shot at Emperor Hirohito and drives around in a loudspeaker-outfitted van. Thanks to Hara’s camera crew, he also attempts to track down the military officers who may have criminally executed some of their own soldiers after the war ended.

As his many surprised suspects -- lumpen men who have settled into lives of old-age serenity -- become unlikely confessors, this dangerously inconsolable inquisitor begins to unravel, at one point physically attacking the most health-impaired of his marks. (He even bullies his way to the phone, offering to call the police himself.) As difficult as Okuzaki’s righteous mission is to watch, and whatever you may think of Hara’s role as catalyst for a lunatic, the power of the documentary is undeniable. A shattering portrait of war’s most lasting, festering wound -- the kind that leaves its sufferer an alien to society, with angry confrontation the only reliable discourse -- and heart-crushingly apt as our own soldiers begin to deal with life after Iraq.

Unorthodox

There’s a hypnotic confluence of introspection and aesthetic curiosity in avant-garde filmmaker Su Friedrich’s work. Her exploration of her roller-coaster relationship with her father, for example, from her 1990 work “Sink or Swim,” takes the form of a ghostly cinematic storybook in which text, a young girl’s narration and black-and-white imagery move between the everyday and the artfully metaphoric. REDCAT and Outfest have collaborated to bring two programs of Friedrich’s work to Los Angeles, and she’ll attend both.

The Outfest program highlights the more sexually themed “Damned If You Don’t” (1987) and “Hide and Seek” (1996). The REDCAT evening features “Sink or Swim” and two L.A. premieres. “Seeing Red” (2005) juxtaposes captured images of the titular color in our world -- on clothes, signs, hair -- with chest-level shots of red-clad Friedrich in full-tilt self-narrated dudgeon about her own insecurities, personal failings and concerns about the motivations of others. “The Head of a Pin” (2004) uses a city-dweller’s myopic view of weekend-getaway sylvan serenity as the basis for an amusing reality check about nature’s not-so-hidden agendas: Half the running time is Friedrich’s video camera trained on a titanic struggle under the kitchen table between a spider and a trapped insect.

Tarantino’s picks

The Quentin Tarantino-curated Los Angeles Grindhouse Festival 2007, celebrating the pulp that inspired his fiction, continues at the New Beverly Cinema with a subgenre-themed “Euro Sex Comedies Triple Feature” that includes “The Oldest Profession,” a late-’60s anthology of prostitution tales, and “Sex on the Run,” a soft-core Casanova yarn -- yawn, more like it -- with middle-aged Tony Curtis in two roles.

weekend@latimes.com

Screenings

Recent Spanish Cinema XIII

* “DarkBlueAlmostBlack”: 7:30 p.m. Friday

* “Alatriste”: 7:30 p.m. Saturday

* “Celia’s Lives”: 7:30 p.m. March 24

Where: Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

Info: (323) 466-3456, americancinematheque.com

Israel Film Festival

* “Sweet Mud”: 9:30 p.m. Saturday, Sunset 5; 7:45 p.m. Sunday, 7:15 p.m. March 22, Town Center 5

Where: Laemmle’s Sunset 5 Theatres, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood; Laemmle’s Town Center 5 Cinemas, 17200 Ventura Blvd., Encino

Info: (877) 966-5566, www.israelfilmfestival.com