TODAY AT THE AFI

F ollowing are The Times’ recommendations for today’s schedule of the American Film Institute International Film Festival, with commentary by the film reviewing staff. All screenings , unless otherwise noted, are at Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd. Information: (213) 466-1767.

Highly Recommended:

“THE YOUNG LADIES OF WILKO�(Poland, 1979; director Andrzej Wajda; 1:50 & 7 p.m.). Set in the early ‘30s and based, like Wajda’s “The Birch Wood,� on the writing of Jaroslav Iwaskiewicz--who appears, at age 85, in the film’s last shot--this is a great work on time’s passing, time’s immutability, a Proustian gamble on the past’s recapture. In the film, literally, we pass over a river that stands between autumn and summer. A young man (Daniel Olbrychksi as Iwaskiewicz’s surrogate, Victor) returns to friends of his youth, a provincial family of five sisters. Victor was in love with another sister, now dead, and has complex entanglements with the rest. As “Wilko� slides, with deceptive languor, toward its complex close, we are kept aware of dark currents beneath the story’s sinuous, sunny interstices. Tremendous acting; lyrical images; a superb movie.

“DIARY OF A MANIAC�(Italy; Marco Ferreri; 4 & 9 p.m.). In a movie world rife with pumped-up “heroism,� Marco Ferreri, possessor of one of the cinema’s darkest wits, gives us an ultimate anti-hero: hapless Benito, a balding toilet-cleaner salesman and eroto-maniac who lives in seedy hotel rooms, falls hopelessly in love with a faithless hooker, and records in a diary his banal routine and bizarre dreams, all mixed together. Jerry Cala, a star Italian TV-movie comic, plays Benito with some of Bill Murray’s hangdog panache, hooker Sabrina Ferilli sizzles, and Ferreri, working with writer Lilliana Betti, puts anguish and insanity just beneath a surface that’s always limpid, comic, waggishly light. The “diary� itself is a major character; by the end, it all but swallows up its writer.