Graceful ‘House’ Tells Tale of Desperation

The Sunset 5’s “Russian Women Filmmakers” continues Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. with Niyole Adomenaite’s elegant and subtle “House Built on Sand,” which inescapably yet favorably brings to mind Nikita Mikhalkov’s “Burnt by the Sun.”

Both are set in the late 1930s during the time of the terrible Stalinist purges, and Adomenaite’s film extends to the advent of World War II with its promises of further hardships, suffering and losses. Each has a sensual, lyrical quality and a sense of Chekhovian desperation. Sonya (Yelena Shechkova) is a plain woman in a circle of intellectuals--a longtime friend of the glamorous Ada (Yelena Shiffers), who in a fit of pique and boredom initiates a cruel joke by starting to send Sonya love letters from a fictional admirer.

Ironically, Ada, who has so much in comparison to Sonya, is the unhappier woman. Subtitles, alas, cannot hope to translate all the connections between Adomenaite’s people or all the nuances of their complex relationship, yet “House Built on Sand” nevertheless is clear enough to generate considerable emotional impact.

Information: (213) 848-3500.

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Cry for Freedom: The ongoing 50th anniversary observation of the founding of East Germany’s DEFA Studios (Goethe Institute, 5700 Wilshire Blvd.) will present Tuesday at 7 p.m. Konrad Wolf’s gorgeous, richly hued 1970 “Goya,” the most ambitious Soviet-East German co-production ever. It is an epic yet intimate account of the Spanish painter and one of the great film biographies of an artist, who in this instance happened to be a court painter at a time when the Inquisition was in full sway.

Donatas Banionis, who bears a striking resemblance to Paul Sorvino, is superb as the larger-than-life Goya, at once a devout Catholic and an irrepressible philanderer who had a notorious affair with the Duchess of Alba and a man who gradually realizes that he cannot ignore the injustice and oppression of the times in which he lived.

Wolf has said that what interested him in Goya was “his hard road to awareness,” and his film, based on Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel, is a glorious cry for freedom of expression.

Information: (213) 525-3388.

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Sweet Irony: Dick Powell once and for all broke away from his musical comedy star image when he made “Murder, My Sweet,” from Raymond Chandler’s “Farewell, My Lovely.”

Ironically, Chandler thought Powell was closer to his notion of his classic private eye Philip Marlowe than Humphrey Bogart, who played him in Howard Hawks’ “The Big Sleep” (1946). As Marlowe in the 1944 film, directed by Edward Dmytryk, Powell tangles with Claire Trevor’s calculating glamour puss over her stolen jade jewelry.

Powell hasn’t the iconic impact of Bogart but is very real, and Trevor is wonderful at showing us the cheap dame beneath a rich wife’s affected airs and speech.

“Murder, My Sweet” screens Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex as part of its “Evil Under the Sun: Film Noir in the City of Angels” series.

Information: (310) 394-9741.

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True Hitchcock: The Silent Movie will screen Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 “Easy Virtue” Wednesday at 8 p.m., which the master of suspense did not consider a true “Hitchcock movie.” Although there’s no suspense, it is in fact a real Hitchcock movie in that in it, his fifth picture, he already displays his unique grasp of the camera’s storytelling possibilities.

“Easy Virtue” is a society drama, adapted from a Noel Coward play, in which a rich, elegant woman (Isabel Jeans, best remembered as the strict aunt in “Gigi”), flees to the south of France in the wake of a scandalous divorce and remarries into English landed gentry only to have her past catch up with her.

Information: (213) 653-2389.

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Tediously Arty: Clarence Fok’s “Naked Killer,” which played a one-week run at the Monica 4-Plex in August, has resurfaced as a Friday-Saturday midnight show at the Sunset 5.

It’s a routine martial arts adventure-romance involving a gorgeous professional assassin (Chingmy Yau) and a cop (Simon Yam). Although sprinkled with kinky eroticism, it veers between the tedious and the arty and is best left to die-hard martial arts fans.

Information: (213) 848-3500.