An Exquisite ‘Anna’

The Nuart will screen Nikita Mikhalkov’s “Anna: From 6 to 18” Saturday and Sunday at noon, repeating it May 3 and 4 at noon.

In one of his finest and surely his most personal work, the Oscar-winning filmmaker views the decline and fall of the USSR through the growing years of his older daughter, asking her the same questions year after year. When he started in 1980, he could not know what wrenchingly dramatic events lay ahead. He presents Anna as being indoctrinated by the Communist Party line as a child but learning over time to think for herself as her nation disintegrates.

Mikhalkov was inspired to make this exquisite, searching film when he was adapting Chekhov’s “Oblomov” to the screen. He intercuts--along with much archival footage of the hollow pomp and circumstance of the public displays of the late Soviet era--scenes of Oblomov’s childhood. By doing this, he wonders how a fictional youth of the late Czarist era and the filmmaker’s daughter could connect, especially in the “absence of God” in the Communist regime, and finds they both possess that celebrated “mysterious Russian soul.” A superb work by a modern master. Information: (310) 478-6379.

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The UCLA Film Archive’s “Made in Hong Kong” series commences today in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater at 7:30 p.m. with the premiere of Peter Chan’s prize-winning “Comrades, Almost a Love Story.” This tale of loss and longing stars Leon Lai and Maggie Cheung; Chan and Cheung are scheduled to appear.

It will be followed by Wong Kar-Wai’s 1994 “Ashes of Time,” a sweeping bravura martial arts period adventure set primarily in a vast desert and dealing with emotions more than with swordplay. It is all but impossible to follow yet is clearly an epic-scale expression of what Wong himself recognized upon its completion as his abiding preoccupation: rejection and the fear of rejection.

“Ashes of Time” suggests that life can be beautiful, it can be an adventure, but that almost everybody is unlucky in love and in life’s choices. Further, he implies that a combination of the workings of fate and emotion will do most of us in every time and that a sense of humor helps.

What’s essential to comprehend are the destinies of its key characters. Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung, with a mustache and goatee) is the saga’s major figure and narrator, who regrets choosing the sword over the woman he loves (Maggie Cheung). After 10 disillusioning years, he has settled down to running a desert inn and serving as an agent for hired killers.

Similarly, Ouyang’s close friend Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Kar-fai) pines for Peach Blossom (Carina Lau), the wife of Huang’s best friend, a swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) who longs only to return home before he goes blind. In the meantime, Huang has met a man, Murong Yang, and jokingly promises to marry his sister, but the “man” is actually the sister, Murong Yin, a martial artist in male disguise, and she takes him seriously. This woman (Brigitte Lin, at her fiercest) goes mad with rejection; but Huang can’t resist remarking, “I couldn’t tell Yin from Yang.” Only the swordsman Hong Qi (Jacky Cheung) proves resilient in the face of life’s vicissitudes. “Ashes of Time” is frustrating but a glorious must for aficionados.

John Woo’s 1990 “Bullet in the Head” (Saturday at 6:30 p.m.) is a powerful, dynamic variation on “The Deer Hunter.” At once an epic adventure, war picture, gangster melodrama and buddy movie, it features three petty Hong Kong crooks who in 1967 take off for Vietnam, where wartime dangers are equaled only by the opportunities to acquire illicit fortunes. Their fate symbolizes the evils of the war itself. They travel to Vietnam during the war to smuggle illegal ampicillin but end up searching for their lost souls; they cannot decide whether they are good guys or bad guys.

Stanley Kwan’s 1988 “Rouge” (Sunday at 4 p.m.) is an exquisite supernatural fable, an opium dream of a movie that re-creates glamorous Hong Kong of the ‘30s and then plays it against the city’s teeming, workaday present to illuminate and contrast the changing relationships between men and women. Anita Mui stars as a ravishing prostitute cursed with a weak-willed lover (Leslie Cheung). What emerges from Kwan’s shifts between past and present is a protest of the folly of women who, out of ingrained custom, sacrifice themselves for men unworthy of them.

Top Hong Kong star Chow Yun-Fat is scheduled to appear with his 1989 “God of the Gamblers” (Sunday at 9 p.m.), in which he plays an unconscious man who awakens with amnesia and childlike behavior but with an incredible knack for gambling. It’s a minor film sustained by a wonderfully versatile and witty performance by Chow. For full schedule and ticket information: (310) 206-FILM.

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Filmforum presents a 90-minute program of films by prize-winning experimental filmmaker Chick Strand at 7 p.m. Sunday at LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd. It opens with one of Strand’s films made in South America, “Mosori Monika” (1970), in which ethnography becomes lyrical as she illuminates the inner lives of a nun and a native woman at a mission at the Orinoco River Delta in Venezuela.

Shrewdly, Strand lets stand the nun’s innocently outrageous remarks (“Before we came, the Indians didn’t know how to do anything”) without unnecessary comment, instead catching us up in the everyday routines of the native woman’s existence.

“Woman of a Thousand Fires” (1976) is a highly sensual, ritualized evocation of sexual desire, also in a South American setting.

“Loose Ends” (1979) is a witty collage of found footage and soundtracks, with establishing shots set in a vintage classroom and suggesting that youngsters are being treated to a panorama of human folly and suffering. (What would experimental filmmakers do without those old educational shorts to recycle?)

Especially beautiful is Strand’s three-minute “Waterfall” (1967), a rush of solarized images from vintage Hollywood musicals. Also screening are “Artificial Paradise” (1986) and “Cartoon Le Mousse” (1979). Film historian David James will introduce Strand for a question-and-answer session following the screening. Information: (213) 526-9211.

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Bryan Gordon’s “Pie in the Sky,” opening Friday at the Monica 4-Plex, has been sold to HBO and released on video. This entirely pleasant if familiar romantic comedy, starring Josh Charles as an aspiring traffic reporter and Anne Heche as a dance student--both very attractive and likable--is far better suited to the small screen than to the big one. With John Goodman, Christine Lahti, Peter Riegert and Christine Ebersole. Information: (310) 394-9744.