‘Kandahar’ Opens Celebration of Iranian Cinema

The UCLA Film Archive’s 12th annual Celebration of Iranian Cinema begins tonight at 7:30 in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater with Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s acclaimed “Kandahar,” which opens a regular run Friday at the Westside Pavilion Cinemas. It already is the most discussed Iranian film for its depiction of life in Afghanistan under the Taliban and for news reports suggesting that one of its key actors, Hassan Tantai, is an American fugitive from justice. Through the journey of an Afghan-born Canadian journalist (Niloufar Pazira), Makhmalbaf reveals the extreme hardships the Afghan people endured under Taliban rule.

Seyyed Reza Mir-Karimi’s “Under the Moonlight” (Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.), which won the critics’ prize at Cannes last year, breaks fresh ground in its implicit criticism of the Islamic clergy. Hossein Pour Sattar stars as Seyyed, a young seminarian about to receive his investiture as a full-fledged mullah. Plagued with doubt, Seyyed finds himself reluctant to don the turban and djellaba, the traditional garb of Iranian clerics, but dutifully secures the fabric from which this robe will be made. When a little boy steals the bolt of cloth from Seyyed on a Tehran subway train, the seminarian pursues him to a homeless community under a bridge on the outskirts of the city.

Seyyed encounters drugs and prostitution but also a group of men who treat each other with the utmost courtesy as a way of maintaining self-respect and staving off hopelessness. In them Seyyed discovers the very spirituality that he finds lacking behind the walls of his spacious and comfortable seminary, where so much attention is paid to petty, even materialistic matters. The contrast provokes in Seyyed a crisis that has been long simmering, and the question becomes whether Seyyed will leave the seminary or decide that he should not allow the human failings he finds at the seminary to detract from his faith and service as a mullah.

In only his second feature, Reza Mir-Karimi, whose first, “The Child and the Soldier,” was shown in the archive’s festival last year, reveals his talent for screen storytelling and directing a wide range of actors and for dealing with controversial subjects in a responsible, fair-minded manner--which won him top rating from the government censor. (More on film festival, Page 18.)

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The archive is launching another series, “Fantastic Voyages,” Friday at 7:30 p.m. at the James Bridges Theater in connection with the UCLA Hammer Museum’s current exhibition, “The World From Here: Treasures of the Great Libraries of Los Angeles.”

Opening the series is Luis Bunuel’s 1954 “Robinson Crusoe,” which may well be the only one of his films intended for release in an English-language version. Not surprisingly, Bunuel, the corrosive critic of church, state and all manner of human folly, manages to be true to himself as well as to novelist Daniel Defoe. A film of Bunuel’s Mexican period, it boasts lush cinematography from the Mexican master Alex Phillips, and splendid, robust portrayals from Daniel O’Herlihy in the title role and Jaime Fernandez as Friday. Its imaginative screenplay was written by then-blacklisted Hollywood veteran Hugo Butler.

No one could accuse Bunuel of building sympathy for Crusoe, who is heard on the soundtrack at the film’s opening telling us that on his way to Africa to buy slaves “for his fellow planters in the Brazils,” his ship encountered a tremendous storm that sent it far off course. Apparently the only survivor, he spots a sunny island and manages to offload many supplies before what’s left of the ship drifts off to sea.

In the film’s first half, Crusoe struggles to conquer his environment and himself, discovering that the Scriptures provide him with less and less comfort. He has learned to accept his fate when, after years without human companionship, he saves the life of a native from a nearby island who has been brought ashore as part of his people’s ritual sacrifice.

Overcome by paranoia, and as an Englishman “of good family,” Crusoe reflexively enslaves the native, whom he names Friday; gradually the relationship shifts to master and servant rather than slave. The questions then become whether true friendship between equals will ever flower and whether, should such equality between them come to pass, it would survive a return to the white man’s “civilization.”

Typically, Bunuel raises such questions, among others, implicitly, and “Robinson Crusoe” is throughout a lively entertainment with O’Herlihy engaged in continual activity and enterprise in his struggle merely to survive. His “Robinson Crusoe” may well have been the great director’s most commercial--and surely most accessible--venture, but it is no less rich in meaning for being so. (310) 206-FILM.

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The American Cinematheque commences its “Grand Master: The Films of Stanley Kubrick” on Friday at 7:30 p.m. in the Lloyd E. Rigler Theater with “The Shining” (1980), in which Jack Nicholson becomes memorably unglued as a writer holed up in a vast, vacant snowed-in mountain resort.

Of special interest is Wednesday’s program, beginning at 7:30 p.m. with Kubrick’s ultra-rare 16-minute “Day of the Fight” (1951), a documentary on middleweight boxer Walter Cartier preparing for a bout. It will be followed by his second feature film, “Killer’s Kiss” (1955), which has enough visual razzle-dazzle to make it a portent of things to come. Best regarded as a precocious home movie, it is a familiar tale of an aspiring but second-rate boxer (Jamie Smith) who falls for a frail blond taxi dancer (Irene Kane), unfortunately also the hapless object of her employer’s mad passion.

Armed with a low but workable budget for the era ($320,000), a solid property (Lionel White’s thriller “Clean Break”) and a fine cast of Hollywood stalwarts, Kubrick made the giant leap from gifted amateur to assured professional in “The Killing” (1956). The film remains not only one of Kubrick’s most satisfying but also one of the best “perfect heist” movies ever made. Although celebrated for its intricate construction involving fragmented time and shifts in point of view (which were in White’s novel), “The Killing” endures above all for its superlative performances. Masterminding a racetrack robbery is a stoic loner (Sterling Hayden, who played a similar role in “The Asphalt Jungle”). Unforgettable, however, are Elisha Cook Jr. as a nervous, henpecked track cashier and Marie Windsor as his brassy, gold-digging wife. To watch them play right up to the edge of all-out comedy is a delight. (323) 466-FILM.