Laughing last?

Mira Nair, Brad Anderson, Jamie Babbit

Documentarians invariably are asked, "How did the subject of your film feel about the way he/she was represented?" The question can elicit amazing answers, since people judge their on-screen doings in unpredictably subjective ways. My favorite anecdote of this sort comes from Mira Nair, the India-born filmmaker (Salaam Bombay, Kama Sutra) whose The Laughing Club of India (1999) plays this Saturday and Sunday, May 6 and 7, at the Harvard Film Archive.

Years ago, when Nair took undergraduate filmmaking classes at Harvard and MIT, she made a 16mm documentary about a young scalawag who callously abandoned his poor bride in India to make it big in America. She showed him the completed work, which foregrounded the misery he had caused others; yet he sat through the screening impassively, except for screaming out "My God!" during one episode of the film. At the end, the young man thanked Nair. He seemed pleased, totally untroubled with the way he was represented.

But why, Nair wanted to know, had he yelled, "My God!"? That's because he was noticing the suit he'd worn in that scene. He realized that he'd left it at the cleaner's!

The Laughing Club of India, which Nair directed with Adam Bartos, is a happily lightweight saga about an unusual movement sweeping Bombay: informal laughing clubs, where adults gather together in the streets, or children at primary school, to act infantile by sticking out tongues, making faces like monkeys, and then laughing and laughing.

HA-HA-HA! HEE!-HEE!-HEE! The object: mental health, physical well-being, a holistic few minutes that are equivalent, perhaps, to the tai chi exercises in Chinese parks. When the chortling is over, the satiated Bombayans slap palms, NBA high-five fashion. Is the laughing working? Dr. Madan Kataria, the spirited man who started it all, is spreading the yucks to the crippled and the blind.

Nair's film is paired at the HFA with Vasiliki Katsarou's Fruitlands 1843, a 39-minute fictional re-creation of Bronson Alcott's famous experiment in utopian living that was filmed in a Shaker village where it actually happened, Harvard, Massachusetts. Katsarou, a formidable talent, shot in breathtaking 35 mm in extraordinary long takes. I don't know that I've ever been as awestruck by cinematography in a local film -- hail the director of photography, Havis Zamberloukos.

But Katsarou's impressive film suffers from the too-determined artiness. The script is so minimal that it's a bit of a puzzle to comprehend. All the people in the commune are dour and damned tense, and I'm not certain why. There's no need for a laughing club, but even a transcendentalist tale could use a pinch of levity.

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It's been down and up for Brad Anderson since the filmmaker of Next Stop Wonderland left Allston-Brighton behind to reside in New York. His new indie, Happy Accidents, in which time-traveling Vincent D'Onofrio from the year 2400 courts Marisa Tomei, was reported to be a disappointment at Sundance 2000, where it had been a hot, sold-out ticket. (I haven't seen it.) And recently Anderson was dismissed by Miramax as the director for a New York-set version of the French comedy The Cat's Away, though not before the film's ex-of-Somerville co-writer, Lyn Vaus, had squeezed in two lunches with the project's star, Heather Graham.

Now the upside: Happy Accidents has been picked up by Paramount Classics and will open at the end of the summer. The Cat's Away may still be produced with another director, in which case Anderson would get at least a co-screenwriting credit. And he continues to negotiate with RKO Pictures about remaking Val Lewton's 1943 B-movie about devil worshippers, The Seventh Victim.

Local movie maven David Kleiler reports that Anderson has contacted him and Tim Graff of the Massachusetts Film Office about scouting a shut-down Danvers state mental hospital as a potential site for a horror film. Said Kleiler, "Brad invoked Lars von Trier's The Kingdom, and he wants to do it in DV."

THERE'S NOTHING quite like a lesbian cheerleader movie for a seedy male heterosexual, so there I was in the third row for the world premiere of But I'm a Cheerleader at last fall's Toronto Festival of Festivals. This good-natured, late-John-Waters-like film is showing May 5 at 8 p.m. at the MFA as the Women's Opening Night entry of the Boston Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. It's a first feature directed by Ohioan Jamie Babbit, a 1993 graduate of Columbia University. In an NYU film class, she met French actress Julie Delpy, who does an amusing cameo as a cruising dyke.

Babbit explained how she'd avoided a potentially damaging X rating because of a hot scene involving her teenage girls, Megan (Natasha Lyonne) and Graham (Clea DuVall). The MPAA, she said, had objected to "any relations of girl on girl, woman on woman, to when Natasha had sex and said, `Oh, eat Graham out!' I fixed everything they told me. The film is an `R' now. I know, that's retarded!"

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

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