Odyssey of drugs and denial

Eric G. Johnson’s “Tweek City,” which has its premiere Sunday at the Monica 4-Plex as part of the Dances With Films Festival, is a double-whammy discovery -- for writer-producer-director Johnson and for his star, Giuseppe Andrews. It is a harrowing yet illuminating odyssey driven by an impassioned, confident filmmaker and a young actor of equal resources and daring.

Although not autobiographical, the film draws upon a dark period in Johnson’s life, which gives it a sense of being told by someone who’s been there and done that.

Andrews’ Bill is a charismatic San Francisco drug dealer who spirals downward on crystal meth over a period of several days. He takes drugs to blot out nightmares of a troubled childhood, which only intensifies his paranoia, his denial of his half-Latino heritage and his homophobia, which may mask a latent homosexuality. Johnson and cinematographer Barry Stone employ various types of cameras, film and tape, and add stylistic flourishes that express Bill’s quicksilver shifts of mood and temperament in a manner that is darkly vital and poetic.

Closing the festival competition is Pete Red Sky’s “The White Horse Is Dead,” a well-sustained, creepy psychological drama in which a young man (Andrew Welsh) trying to put a troubled past behind him signs on as a gardener at a rambling country estate. He becomes ensnared by its owner, a monstrously manipulative, man-hating widow (Irena Stemer) with a lovely daughter (Resmine Atis), longing to free herself from her domineering mother.

Taiwanese cinema

The UCLA Film Archive’s In Our Time: New Taiwanese Cinema will present Chien Wei-ssu and Kuo Chen-ti’s “Viva Tonal -- The Dance Age” on Friday. It is a captivating documentary that illuminates life in Taiwan in the 1930s through popular music.

In contrast to most depictions of Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, this film shows that the decade preceding Japan’s invasion of China had its progressive aspects -- that in fact the rapid Westernization of Japan in its Meiji period also fostered modernization in Taiwan. By the 1910s phonographs were imported, and eventually both Columbia and Victor established Taiwan’s recording industry.

The film takes its title from 1933’s “The Dance Age,” a Taiwanese recording, launching its Viva-tonal Recording series. Sung by the immensely popular Chun Chun, it features such surprising lyrics as “I’m a liberated woman, moving about footloose and fancy free ... I’m a fool for the foxtrot.”

From this song, the filmmakers explore the life and career of Chun Chun, who died in 1943 of tuberculosis but who is remembered vividly by her equally popular contemporary Ai-Ai, now in her 80s.

The filmmakers also explore and research the lives of the song’s lyricist and its composer and gradually create a portrait of the popular arts and culture from those who lived during that era.

There is a delightful interlude with a man in his 70s who runs his father’s venerable music store in the city of Yilan. He shares a clutch of nostalgic reminiscences but catches the viewer up short when he reveals that not far from the store was the airfield where Japan’s kamikaze pilots took flight -- and at that point a chilling kamikaze pilots’ anthem of self-sacrifice is heard above views of their long-abandoned and overgrown airfield. The jaunty song that is “The Dance Age” becomes the pebble tossed in the deceptively still pond.

Lee Kang-sheng, star of Tsai Ming-liang’s masterpiece “The River” and other Tsai films, makes his directorial debut with “The Missing.” It is as stark a rendering of alienation in contemporary Taipei as any film his mentor had made.

Lee tells two parallel stories of the utmost simplicity but with a wrenching visual and emotional acuity. The setting is a vast, incomplete park, which perversely seems designed more to separate people than to bring them together. A grandmother (Lu Yi-ching) leaves her 3-year-old grandson in the care of a young girl so that she can go to the restroom, only to discover the grandson has been allowed to wander off.

The grandmother’s distress builds to hysteria, as she cannot locate her grandson while being met with near-total indifference to her plight from others in the park.

Meanwhile, a teenager skips school to spend the day at a video arcade; he discovers his grandfather is missing.

It has been accurately observed that Lee eschews the absurdist touches typical of Tsai, yet Lee proves to be a powerful filmmaker with “The Missing,” which is as unrelenting in its depiction of the plights of the grandmother and the youth as it is compelling and compassionate.

*

Screenings

Dances With Films Festival

* “Tweek City”: 9:30 p.m. Sunday, 12:30 p.m. Tuesday

* “The White Horse Is Dead”:

9:30 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Monica 4-Plex,

1332 2nd St., Santa Monica

Info: (323) 850-2929

In Our Time: New Taiwanese Cinema

* “Viva Tonal -- The Dance Age”: 7:30 p.m. Friday

* “The Missing”: 7 p.m. Sunday

Where: James Bridges Theater, 1409 Melnitz Hall, UCLA campus

Info: (310) 206-FILM