TODAY AT THE AFI

Following 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.

Recommended:

“BOWL OF BONE: TALE OF THE SYUWE”(Canada; Jan-Marie Martell; 1:30 & 6:45 p.m.). The voice-over narration, by director Martell, is so intensely self-absorbed, it gets off-putting. But a fascinating subject compensates: American Indian medicine woman, herbalist and oral historian Annie Zetco York, whose 15-year relationship with Martell is chronicled in talk and luminous images of the British Columbia landscape, the source of her herbs, magic and earthly hymns. The movie, which gets progressively darker, is about the search for the self, the world’s secrets and, most of all, the pain of blasted illusions. The “bowl of bone” is our human skull.