Israeli weaves tale of new lives

EYAL HALFON’S “What a Wonderful Place” is an engaging and potent work that arrives upon a recent wave of diverse and outstanding films from Israel -- an apt work that was to open the 21st Israel Film Festival on Wednesday night. As part of the festival, which runs through Dec. 15 at various venues, the movie will screen an additional four times, including Sunday night.

Halfon interweaves several stories that cast a steady light on the harsh existence of immigrants, legal and otherwise, in Israel. The key story involves a middle-aged ex-cop, Franco (Uri Gavriel), whose compulsive gambling has cost him his job and plunged him into debt. He works off the debt by providing muscle for an operation smuggling young women into Israel, where they in turn must work off their indebtedness by becoming prostitutes or domestics. Young Jana (Evelyne Kaplun) strikes Franco as especially vulnerable, and over time he grows increasingly protective of her.

In the meantime, Halfon cuts to the struggles of Eddie (Ramon Bagatsing), a Filipino caregiver to a cranky, elderly Israeli man, and of a Thai worker (Cherdpong Laoyont) who has a warm relationship with his employer (Avi Oria), who suffers from an eating disorder -- and a wife who is having an affair with the son of Eddie’s elderly patient.

Halfon is such a good storyteller that his film never seems contrived or even overly coincidental; the connections between these and others seem perfectly natural. Halfon creates a mosaic of the immigrant experience in Israel that suggests that by and large it is needlessly brutal, relieved by unexpected gestures of kindness and good fortune.

Good experiments

Filmforum will present a pair of important works by outstanding experimental filmmakers, Chick Strand’s “Soft Fiction” (1979) and Amy Halpern’s “Falling Lessons” (1992), on Sunday at the American Cinematheque in Hollywood.

The first is a 54-minute sensual reverie, its stream-of-consciousness style sustained by Strand’s seductive, flowing images. They juxtapose scenes of everyday life with unsparing confessions of sexual longing and survival, some amusing, others stark -- with an honesty that is almost poetically eloquent.

Halpern’s 64-minute “Falling Lessons” is a stunningly sensual, life-affirming experience from a major experimental film artist that is open to myriad meanings. The film is a rhythmic montage of almost 200 faces, human and animal, that Halpern pans vertically, creating a cascade of visages suggesting that although individuals express a range of emotions, they remain enigmas.

Malle series ends

Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Human, Too Human: The French Films of Louis Malle” concludes Saturday with two of his most experimental and rarely seen features, “Zazie Dans le Metro” (1960) and “Black Moon” (1975). In the first, Malle attempts to pay tribute to American silent comedy while satirizing recent celebrated European films, but the combination fizzles. This tale of the adventures of a foulmouthed little girl (Catherine Demongeot) and her female-impersonator uncle (Philippe Noiret) is like a roller coaster that lurches out of control and comes to a grinding halt.

“Black Moon,” Malle’s most challenging and surreal film, is an exquisite, often nightmarish and mainly perplexing fantasy. Yet it is also an enormously tantalizing and oddly compelling film that invites the viewer to respond to it intuitively. It seems that the Trojan Wars are being fought not far from a French provincial manor house where an English girl (Cathryn Harrison) seeks refuge with a bizarre old lady (Therese Giehse). Other members of the household are Joe Dallesandro, who sings Wagner while pruning trees, and Alexandra Stewart, who hums a lot but says nothing.

Starting with the appearance of a unicorn, Malle draws upon an array of archetypal figures and situations to evoke most powerfully a feeling of life’s essential mystery. Decrying war and cherishing nature, Malle presents the entire spectrum of human behavior; only art, he seems to be saying, can make sense of life’s absurdities. Screening Friday at 7:30 p.m.: “Murmur of the Heart” (1971) and “May Fools” (1990).

Note: The UCLA Television and Film Archive’s Mikio Naruse series concludes at 7:30 p.m. Friday in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater with “Mother” (1952), starring Kinuyo Tanaka, and “The Whole Family Works” (1939). (310) 206-FILM.

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Screenings

Israel Film Festival

* “What a Wonderful Place”: 9:45 p.m. Sunday

Where: Laemmle’s Fallbrook 7, 6731 Fallbrook Ave., West Hills

Info: (877) 966-5566, www.israelfilmfestival.com

Filmforum

* “Soft Fiction” and “Falling Lessons”: 7 p.m. Sunday

Where: Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

Info: (213) 386-8482, lafilmforum.org

Louis Malle series

* “Zazie Dans le Metro” and “Black Moon”: 7:30 p.m. Saturday

Where: LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

Info: (323) 857-6010, www.lacma.org