A Glowing ‘Bride’

Guita Schyfter’s warm, intimate “Like a Bride” is a highly evocative, richly detailed story of two Jewish girls (Claudette Maille, Rifke Groman) growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s and, in the process, developing a resistance to traditional expectations.

The 1993 film is believed to be the first to deal with Mexico’s long-established Jewish community and its special challenges in coexisting with the heavily Catholic majority. “Like a Bride,” which was the opening attraction in the American Cinematheque’s February 1994 Mexican cinema series, commences a one-week run Friday at the Music Hall, launching a Jewish Cinema Series. (310) 274-6869.

*

Screening tonight in the final evening of the 12th annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film and Video Festival is Yon Fan’s endearing and energetic “Bugis Street.” In it, Hiep Thi Le, the star of Oliver Stone’s “Heaven and Earth,” plays a naive but intelligent and reflective 16-year-old from the country who takes a job as a servant at a charming old hotel in Singapore. The film screens at 7 p.m. at the Music Hall.

What this young woman is totally unprepared for is that the hotel caters to transvestite and transsexual hookers. Clearly, the transvestites are the real thing, and beneath the extravagant clothes and emotional displays, they are wise in the ways of the world, as the new maid soon realizes.

“Bugis Street” is alternately over-the-top and tender--blatantly ogling the hunky men in the hookers’ lives, yet possessed of a genuinely poetic sensibility. The film will be followed at 9 p.m. with the festival’s closing-night attraction, a sneak preview of Chen Kaige’s “Temptress Moon,” starring Leslie Cheung and Gong Li. (213) 680-4462.

*

Michael Levin’s incisive, heartening “Dream of a City: Creating East Palo Alto,” which is the first film in the American Cinematheque’s “Rediscovering America” series, screens tonight at 7:30 at Raleigh Studios. Levin documents a community in which one resident aptly observes, “We’re the new America.”

For decades East Palo Alto, midway between San Francisco and San Jose, was rich farmland, and parts of it still are. But it became decisively the “wrong side of the tracks” once the Bayshore Highway cut it off from the rest of Palo Alto in the 1930s. When the Bayshore inevitably was enlarged to become a freeway, East Palo Alto lost a large hunk of its business district, severely eroding its tax base.

Levin’s exemplary, consciousness-raising documentary surveys a community, gradually turning poor, black and now becoming multiracial, that has long been cursed with shortsighted county and state policies and an invasion of crack cocaine dealers that got it labeled the murder capital of the U.S. in 1992. We see how it has pulled together to drive off the drug peddlers and to attempt to get itself on its feet financially, a daunting and highly uncertain undertaking.

Levin acquaints us with people of different races, cultures and generations--for example, some elderly white people and an elderly Japanese American who have stayed put all their lives and are capable of embracing social change and its challenges. These people have gotten to know and respect one another in their common struggle for the survival of their city.

A lot of articulate, savvy and decent people--black, white, Latino and Asian Pacific--speak frankly and with hope for a better future. Although many of the homes of East Palo Alto are indeed modest, streets are wide, residential lots are big, there are many trees--and there’s still some of that rich farmland. The community is ripe for being overtaken by developers, as its citizens know, and they tell us of their determination to take charge of their destiny.

In this celebration of diversity, Levin has presented us with a warm group portrait that offers a lesson for Los Angeles.

Also screening: Mark Schwartzbard’s 21-minute “Road Movie,” a satiric account of a journey down the East Coast. (213) 466-FILM.

*

In “Fetishes” (opening Friday at the Sunset 5), veteran documentarian Nick Broomfield takes a serious look at a luxurious legal Manhattan establishment catering to individuals, mainly men, who are driven to submit themselves to various forms of humiliation at the hands of a group of dominatrixes. In this case, the dominatrixes prove to be astute, highly articulate and responsible professionals of admirable self-knowledge and compassion. They view what they do as therapy, and a number of their clients understand the source of their fetishism.

But you wonder why Broomfield never asks anyone if he or she has considered seeing a psychiatrist to try to work through the fetishism. Perhaps he means us to understand these people derive too much pleasure and fulfillment from indulging their kinkiness to even consider that. Information: (213) 848-3500.

*

The American Cinematheque’s “Sacred Monsters: The Fantastic Cinema of Georges Franju” commences Friday at Raleigh Studios at 7:15 p.m with “Judex” (1964), a poignant, witty feature-length homage to Louis Feuillade’s 12-chapter 1916 serial featuring a Zorro-hatted hero, a super-detective who anticipated indestructibles like Batman. Just at the stroke of midnight, the infamous banker Favroux, having announced the engagement of his daughter (Edith Scob) to an impoverished nobleman, falls dead--or so it would seem--in front of his guests at a ball for which they have come plumed and masked as various birds.

His apparent death has thrown awry the plans of the adventuress Marie Verdier (Francine Berge), who was about to marry the old boy. Most of this beautiful and striking film is taken up with the nefarious plotting of Marie to get hold of the Favroux fortune.

All of this is presented by Franju, a director with the austerity of a Carl Dreyer or a Robert Bresson, without the least trace of camp. His purpose is to show what Judex (dashing American magician Channing Pollock, perfectly cast) meant to World War I audiences by giving Feuillade’s characters a human dimension. He does this by suggesting, via Feuillade’s incredible coincidences, that we are not masters of our fates--that we could all use the superhuman powers of Judex to rescue us from our troubles.

“Judex” will be followed by “Eyes Without a Face” (Les Yeux sans Visage), one of the most poetic, heartbreaking and haunting horror films you will ever see.

Revived recently, it was made in 1959, subsequently released in the U.S. as an exploitation picture dubbed and retitled “The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus.” In the ‘60s, however, it was released in its original version with English subtitles.

Veteran French star Pierre Brasseur plays a plastic surgeon responsible for ruining the face of his beloved daughter (Scob) in a car accident. Unhinged by the tragedy, the surgeon has his assistant (Alida Valli) kidnap and murder women so he may graft on the skin of their faces to that of his daughter.

For these two films, composer Maurice Jarre created two of his finest scores, and the ominously insistent music for “Eyes Without a Face” is especially memorable.

On Saturday at 7:15 p.m., “Judex” will screen again, followed at 9:30 with Franju’s first film, “The Keepers” (La Te^te Contre les Murs) (1958) in which Jean-Pierre Mocky stars as a rebellious young man clamped into a mental institution by his rich father. It was based on a 1949 novel exposing conditions in mental hospitals in the ‘30s, and it anticipates “Eyes Without a Face” in its concern with the thin line between madness and sanity. Brasseur and Scob also star, along with Anouk Aimee and Charles Aznavour. More Franju films next weekend. (213) 466-FILM.

*

Note: The Midnight Special Bookstore, 1318 Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica, will present Saturday two different programs of short films, one at 7 p.m. and another at 9 p.m. (310) 393-2923.