A Poetic Outpouring

The UCLA Film Archive’s “Dariush Mehrjui: Trapeze Without a Net” spotlights one of Iran’s greatest directors (who studied film and philosophy at UCLA), an artist who brings a shimmering poetic sensibility even to the harshest circumstances. A series of seven Mehrjui films begins tonight at 7:30 in Melnitz Hall with “The Pear Tree.” In this 1998 film, Homayoun Mershadi plays one of his country’s leading poets and intellectuals who has retreated to his family’s country estate to write his magnum opus only to have persistent servants nag him about a certain tree that won’t bear fruit. Gradually, the writer comes to identify with the tree, discovering a need to get in touch with nature and himself and to consider lying fallow until he feels truly regenerated. The result is a subtle, contemplative film about the need to reconsider one’s past in charting the future. It will be followed by “The Cow” (1969), an exquisitely wrought fable about a peasant (Ezat Entezami) so attached to his cow, a key life source for himself and his fellow villagers, that when it is killed by marauders he starts losing his sanity.

This is one of those films into which much can be read, and “The Cow” put Iranian cinema on the map.

Screening Saturday at 7:30 p.m. is “The Cycle” (1974), a masterpiece of world cinema in which Mehrjui follows an elderly man and his grandson from the country to Tehran, where they hope to find a better life. Instead, the grandfather is swiftly reduced to a highly symbolic selling of his blood and his grandson is caught up in big-city corruption in their struggle for survival. Not surprisingly, this devastating critique of life under the shah was swiftly banned. “Hamoon” (1990) is a male-midlife-crisis drama that also illuminates what life is like in Iran today. A frustrated writer, part-time high school teacher of English and executive in a large import-export concern, Hamoon (Khosro Shakibai) is devastated by his wife’s announcement that she wants a divorce just as they are moving into a luxurious modern residence they can’t really afford. The catch is that in present-day Iran a woman, who has few rights under Islamic law, cannot divorce her husband except under special circumstances. The film is a study in self-absorption; its self-tormenting, self-indulgent hero is so caught up in his sense of failure and frustration in a changing society that he is blind to the impact of his mistreatment of his wife (Bita Farrahi) and is less proud of her success as an artist than he is threatened by it. The series continues next Thursday. (310) 206-8588.

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Outfest ‘99, the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, enters its second half with further outstanding programs at the Directors Guild of America (7920 Sunset Blvd.), the Sunset 5 (8000 Sunset Blvd.), the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center’s Village at Ed Gould Plaza (1125 N. McCadden Place), the Egyptian (6712 Hollywood Blvd.) and Pantages (6233 Hollywood Blvd.) theaters and the John Anson Ford Amphitheater (2580 Cahuenga Blvd. E., Hollywood).

Rose Troche, whose “Go Fish” five years ago was a breakthrough lesbian romantic comedy, returns with “Bedrooms & Hallways” (Ford, Thursday at 8:30 p.m.), a jaunty British romantic comedy written by Robert Farrar and starring Kevin McKidd and James Purefroy as a gay man and a straight man discovering sexual fluidity as they become involved not only with each other but also, unwittingly, the same woman (Jennifer Ehle). There’s also an amusing spoof of the men’s self-esteem movement embodied by Simon Callow’s unctuous New Age guru.

Jean-Jacques Zilberman’s “Man Is a Woman” (DGA 1, Friday at 7:15 p.m.) is one of the festival’s strongest foreign entries. It’s a witty yet wry romantic comedy in which a gay French Jew (Antoine de Caunes) is pressured by his family to marry a beautiful, virginal but well-informed Hasidic girl from New York (the radiant Elsa Zylberstein). What they mutually discover is the difference between love and desire.

Anne Wheeler’s zesty, affectionate romantic comedy “Better Than Chocolate” (Ford, Friday at 8:30 p.m.) finds a vivacious Vancouver 19-year-old (Karyn Dwyer) commencing a romance with a cool, stunning itinerant artist (Christina Cox). Events take a turn when her freshly divorced mother (Wendy Crewson) and younger brother (Kevin Mundy) announce they’re moving in with her--which makes it all the more imperative that Dwyer come out as a lesbian to her mother, whose obtuseness defies credibility in this otherwise engaging film.

A minuscule budget proved a crucial plus for documentarian Parris Patton, for the four years it took to make “Creature” (Village, Saturday at 9:30 p.m.) enable us to see Kyle Dean’s transformation from Hollywood club drag performer to pre-op transsexual; it also allows his rural, religious North Carolina parents to become accustomed to their son becoming a beautiful daughter, Stacey. This territory has been covered before but rarely with such perception, clarity and detachment.

Another outstanding documentary, made by “Paris Is a Woman’s” Greta Schiller and writer Mark Gevisser, is “The Man Who Drove With Mandela” (DGA 1, Saturday at 4:30 p.m.), which calls attention to Cecil Williams, a dashing, esteemed Johannesburg theater director and anti-apartheid activist who helped smuggle an exiled Nelson Mandela back into Africa to continue his African National Congress organizing by posing as Williams’ chauffeur. When they were arrested in August 1962, Williams, then 55, was released the next day while Mandela was facing life imprisonment. Corin Redgrave plays Williams in scenes of self-reflection drawn from this uncommonly courageous man’s writings.

Scott King’s ambitious and surreal “Treasure Island” (Village, Sunday at 4:30 p.m.) imagines two World War II cryptographers: the beefy, macho Sam (Nick Offerman) and the slim, sophisticated Frank (Lance Baker), stationed in San Francisco on the site of the 1939 World’s Fair, who start believing a corpse for whom they are composing letters of disinformation for the enemy is coming alive. Sam is working through his latent homosexuality in three-way encounters involving his wife and a series of men while Frank indulges in two wives and a mistress. King means to skewer the sexual hypocrisy of the era as well as its racism, and he takes great pains to make his picture look authentic. It’s too bad it doesn’t have the brisk pace and lack of pretension that characterized Hollywood’s wartime serials and films noir.

Jim Fall’s crowd-pleasing romantic comedy “Trick” closes the festival Monday at 5 p.m. and again at 8 p.m. at the Egyptian. Christian Campbell stars as a boyish, self-absorbed New York wannabe Broadway composer who is astonished to discover there’s mutual attraction between him and a likable, uncomplicated go-go dancer (John Paul Pitoc) with the requisite perfect body. Ironically, the considerable struggle the guys face in finding sufficient privacy to consume their lust causes them to get to know and care for each other. There’s a standout performance from Tori Spelling as Campbell’s best pal, as ambitious as he to make it as a star in musical comedy. (323) 960-2330.

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Direct from Outfest ‘99, Jake West’s “Razor Blade Smile” (Fridays and Saturdays at midnight at the Sunset 5) is a silly, gory, overly self-congratulatory vampire comedy in which Eileen Daly stars as a contemporary vampire, a hired killer in black rubber who is as likely to open fire with a submachine gun as she is to put the bite on you, which seems more than a little overkill. (323) 960-2330.

As writer, producer, director and star of “DWM” (“Divorced White Male”), which opens a one-week run Friday at the Monica 4-Plex (1332 2nd St., Santa Monica), Lou Volpe has made an appealing, well-made film about the dating hell of the recently divorced. When his wife up and leaves him and their four kids to experience life on her own, a devastated Al (Volpe) eventually tries his luck in the personals; meanwhile, so does a lovely young woman, Amy (Lauren Bailey), who has finally gotten up the courage to leave her abusive husband--but that’s not how these two thoroughly likable people meet. This wry romantic comedy represents a highly personal accomplishment made on a shoestring budget. Unfortunately, it is marred by its presentation on a murky print with wobbly sound. (310) 394-9741.