AFI Fest Offers Tales of Conflict, History

The AFI Film Festival continues full force in various venues. Aurelio Grimaldi’s “Nerolio� (Monica 4-Plex, today) is a stunningly persuasive imagining of the last several days in the life of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the ever controversial Italian actor-poet who was murdered by a hustler in 1975.

Grimaldi envisions Pasolini--he never calls him by name--as a brilliant, arrogant man who compulsively cruised handsome young men until he at last met one whose masculinity he too much taunted; it’s as if he had a death wish.

Working from a script by his late father, John Cassavetes, and directing his mother, Gena Rowlands, actor Nick Cassavetes makes a terrific directorial debut with “Unhook the Stars� (Chinese Theatre, Tuesday), in which Rowlands has one of her richest roles as a lonely widow whose life brightens when she starts caring for a little boy (Jake Lloyd), the son of a feisty neighbor (Marisa Tomei) whose husband has walked out on her.

“Unhook the Stars,� however, goes further, showing Rowlands as a beautiful woman approaching 60 and discovering that she’s at a pivotal point where she can either slip easily into senior citizenship or shake up her life. Gerard Depardieu, no less, turns up--and may influence her decision.

Barry J. Hershey’s grueling “The Empty Mirror� (Chinese Theatre, Thursday) imagines an Adolf Hitler who eschews suicide to dictate his memoirs to a young officer while holed up in the bunker. Norman Rodway is a formidable Fuhrer, but “The Empty Mirror� makes us wonder if Hershey isn’t giving Hitler too much credit by presenting him as a man capable of deep, crisply articulated self-knowledge who seasons his remarks with Machiavellian political advice.

Ronald Levaco’s “Round Eyes in the Middle Kingdom� (Monica 4-Plex, Thursday) is a remarkable documentary in which Levaco returns to China to rediscover his past--he lived a life of privilege there until the time of the Communist revolution when he was 10--and to honor his father’s best friend, Israel Epstein. Epstein was a Russian Jew who joined Mao’s struggle and emerged from five years of solitary confinement--imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution for no valid reason--without bitterness and whose greatest fear in fact was that he might be deported.

Lin Cheng-sheng’s “A Drifting Life� (Chinese Theatre, Friday) is a beautiful, detached account of life’s eternal cycles as seen through the fate of a Taiwanese peasant family that loses its young mother in childbirth, leaving her formidable mother-in-law to raise her lackadaisical young son and bright, dutiful daughter. Lin leaves us painfully aware of how very hard it is for people who have always known poverty to better themselves--to comprehend, in even in the contemporary world, of the value of education for a girl.

Jose Luis Garcia Agraz’s heady, intoxicating “Salon Mexico� (Monica 4-Plex, Sunday, and LACMA, Oct. 30) tells of a mid-’30s crime of passion from several points of view, “Rasohomon�-style. The setting is a Mexico City dance hall, a hangout for composer Aaron Copland. It involves a fiery triangle--a macho pimp and the two women who love him--and boasts irresistible music and atmosphere.

The late Lino Brocka’s powerful 1981 “Bona� (LACMA, Saturday) offers a deeply compassionate portrait of an 18-year-old woman who, in becoming enamored of a sexy, no-good movie extra, is caught between a man for whom she is merely a servant and her brutal, tyrannical father. Brocka reveals the perils of a poor woman daring to try to make her own way in a profoundly male chauvinist society.

Sergei Bodrov’s “Prisoner of the Mountains� (Monica 4-Plex, Saturday) is a brilliant, beautifully photographed transposition of a Tolstoy story to the current Chechen conflict, in which a young Russian soldier becomes caught up in a risky prisoner exchange.

Jan Troell’s “Hamsun� (Monica 4-Plex, Monday) is film biography at its finest, as Troell reveals how it came to be that a Norwegian Nobel laureate for literature could be held for treason after World War II.

Max Von Sydow and Ghita Norby, veteran Danish star, give two of the greatest portrayals of their distinguished careers as Knut Hamsun and his wife, Marie, who in their naivete and insolation, fired by a loathing of British imperialism and by their own tempestuous marriage, became pawns of the Nazis.

For full schedule and tickets, call Theatix: (213) 466-1767.