Hungarian Film Festival Opens

The second annual Hungarian Film Festival opens tonight at 8 p.m. at the Harmony Gold Theater, 7655 Sunset Blvd., with the U.S. premiere of “Out of Order,” adapted from Ray Cooney’s stage farce by its writers-directors-stars Robert Koltai and Andras Kern, two of Hungary’s top comedians. It also marks the first film produced by Hollywood veteran Andrew G. Vajna in his native country.

The rest of the festival will be held at the Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, where veteran director Karoly Makk’s exquisitely wrought English-language film “The Gambler” will screen Friday at 7:30 p.m. This film focuses on the relationship between Fyodor Dostoevsky (Michael Gambon) and the young stenographer Anna (Jodhi May), who becomes his wife; it parallels the 160-page novel he is dictating to her against a 27-day deadline.

A disheveled, alternately volatile and tender writer deeply in debt--hence the deadline--and plagued with epileptic seizures, Dostoevsky spins a tale of passion and romance, set in Baden-Baden amid a group of obsessive gamblers, including a young man, Alexei (Dominic West), who clearly is the young Dostoevsky. They include the grandmother Alexei summons from Moscow and who becomes just as caught up with roulette as the others. The grandmother is played with terrific panache and vitality by none other than two-time Oscar winner Luise Rainer, returning to the screen after a 55-year absence.

Gambon, May and others are also impressive in this beautifully articulated period piece, which glows with Jan van den Steenhoven’s perfectly modulated color camera work amid flawless, evocative vintage settings and locales. “The Gambler” also screens Wednesday at 9:50 p.m. Makk’s equally fine 1971 “Love,” which marked Lili Darvas’ return to Hungarian cinema after many years’ absence, screens Saturday at 5 p.m.

The Eastern European cinemas are among the oldest and most distinguished, and they have survived wars, fascism and communism to carry on a rich humanist tradition.

Gyorgy Feher’s “Passion” (Oct. 22 at 9:50 p.m.), a highly stylized reworking of James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” has a raw, visceral impact as Feher moves boldly between elliptical images and long-held shots to give the tale a raw immediacy. A robust, elderly man (Dzsoko Rozsics), a rural mechanic, orders his young, virile helper (Janos Derzsi) to dance a tango with his wife (Ildiko Bansagi, one of Hungary’s most internationally renowned actresses), then abruptly cuts in, whirls her around and heads upstairs alone. This abrupt pre-titlesequence sets the film’s brutal tone and swiftly plunges us into the familiar tale of lust leading to murder, but Feher brings a wide range of insights and ironies to itsunfolding.

Rozsics stars in Bence Gyongyossy’s “Gypsy Lore” (Sunday at 7:30 p.m. and Wednesday at 5 p.m.), a gentle, endearing recasting of “King Lear” as a contemporary tale of gypsy life in which a pivotal background event is the government demolition of a gypsy village and removal of its inhabitants to apartment dwellings. Accompanied everywhere by a young violinist, Rozsics’ Lear-figure, once he has been displaced, makes it his life’s final goal to track down the daughter who would not take anything from him--but who would not make a public declaration of her love for him either. “Gypsy Lore,” which marked the directorial debut of one of Hungary’s foremost directors, the late Imre Gyongyossy, has a shimmering lyrical quality, and while the father’s endless supply of stories make him amusingly tiresome, he’s a man of truly heroic stature, played superbly by Rozsics. “Gypsy Lore” is Hungary’s official entry in the Academy Awards.

Petite, lovely Eva Kerekes has deservedly won international acting prizes for her portrayal of a naive young woman in Sandor Simo’s devastatingly subtle “Every Sunday” (Sunday at 5 p.m.). The film spans the outbreak of World War II to the coming of Stalinism. Kerekes’ Franciska, a happy-go-lucky servant, falls in love with a paunchy, middle-aged, married Jew, Lajos (Denes Ujlaki), a warm bear of a man. Their affair is interrupted by the war but resumes when, shortly after peace, his wife dies. Swiftly, the severe new Communist order emerges, but Franciska blithely goes about her life, becoming a policewoman assigned to a camp for political prisoners and viewing a promotion to membership in the secret police as merely a change in uniform. Somehow her relationship with the not surprisingly more aware Lajos flourishes, and she continues going through life with blinders. The way in which Simo winds up his jaunty yet scorching political allegory is wonderfully understated--and all the more powerful for being so. For full schedule: (818) 848-7395.

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No national cinema has weathered so many wars and so much political upheaval as that of China, and it’s scarcely surprising that movies made in various eras before the 1949 Communist Revolution can be endlessly fascinating, such as those of the leftist cinema of Shanghai in the ‘30s and those made in the few years between the end of World War II and the fall of Chiang Kai-shek, that reveal the impact of Hollywood.

The UCLA Film Archive’s “Pre-Revolution Chinese Classics” commences Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater with Sun Yu’s robust, stylish “The Highway” (1934), a silent with musical interludes and sound effects. Set against Japan’s invasion of China, it is nonetheless a hearty celebration of the strong, likable young men who labor night and day building a highway vital to bChina’s defenses. “The Goddess” (1934), screening Sunday at 7 p.m., is a highly charged, socially conscious melodrama that shows to full advantage the beauty and talent of the legendary Ruan Ling-yu, whose dazzling screen presence elicits comparisons with Gish, Garbo and Brooks.

Directed by Wu Yung-Jiang, “The Goddess,” which is silent, has moments that border on the sublime. Ruan, a mere slip of a girl with a riveting intensity, emerges as a kind of ultimate madonna-whore, a streetwalker who sells her body to ensure her small son’s education. The film is exquisitely subtle and richly visual. Following the Oct. 22 screening of “Unchanged Heart in Life and Death” (1936), a politically charged “wrong man” drama, will be Jin Shan’s “Along the Sungari River” (1947), set in 1931, just as Japan invades. Savage Japanese soldiers casually decimate a lovely, inviting rural community, and a young couple survive only to end up as slave laborers in a coal mine, where they are soon leading a rebellion.

The film’s lyrical first half has been justly praised by pioneer film historian Jay Leyda as “among the high points of international film history,” for its remarkable ability to combine the beautiful and the bleak.

Shen Fu’s “The Lights of Ten Thousand Homes” (1948), which boasts an exceptionally sharp print, commences the series’ closing program on Oct. 27 at 7:30 p.m. It reflects a time in the aftermath of war when harsh conditions in the countryside drove people to big cities.

For a full schedule of this outstanding and rare series: (310) 206-FILM.

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German filmmaker Martin Walz’s “Killer Condom” (opening Friday at the Nuart for one week) is a strained, tedious sex-horror comedy that doesn’t travel well, even though it is set in Manhattan. Udo Samel stars as a gay veteran NYPD detective in search of a lethal prophylactic. (310) 478-6379.

Cha Chuen-Yi’s “Once Upon a Time in Triad Society 1” (at the Sunset 5 on Fridays and Saturdays at midnight) is a darkly comic gangster epic that finds an exceptionally nasty young Hong Kong gangster (Francis NgChun-Yu) severely wounded and lying in a hospital bed. He commences telling his life story as a way of explaining how he came to be so cruel and ruthless. But he recovers to relate a decidedly different version of his life, leaving us to ponder the whole riddle of heredity and environment. (213) 848-3500.