Small world

Fine films from Israel, Denmark, India

Saint Clara, which is playing at the MFA September 10, 14, and 18, swept virtually all the 1996 Israeli Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Notwithstanding that it's unwaveringly unusual.

Nobody in the movie talks about being Jewish, or argues the Arab-Israeli border. Instead, this haunting, visionary work (based on a 1980 Czech-set novel by Czech dissident Pavel Kahout) stretches Israel's film frontier into an apocalyptic near-future. The environs of Haifa, where filmmakers Ari Folman and Ori Sivan grew up, are shot to look like a sci-fi moon city. "Israel 1999," when Saint Clara takes place, is a dystopic wasteland, Delicatessen meets the stark, lonely vision of Edward Hopper.

The story -- romantic, poetic, heartfelt -- is a postpunk Rebel Without a Cause: teen love in the ruins, in the hyperkinetic night, away from parents and teachers who are too lame and ineffectual to understand. The kids talk slangy Hebrew. The adults sink into solipsistic reveries, fetishized memories of what probably never happened: beating Bobby Fischer at chess, bedding down with Edith Piaf, etc. (In Israeli films, grown-ups expound way too much; and here, for a change, they come off as grotesque for their long-winded speeches.)

Saint Clara's Natalie Wood is a 13-year-old Russian refugee (cherub-cheeked Lucy Dubinchov) who can foretell the future, from what questions are going to appear on math exams to what numbers will win the lottery. Clara's prophecies land her in deep trouble at the Rivers Edge-like Golda Meir School, and with the local citizenry. Nobody likes a visionary. So she finds romance with Eddie (Halil Elohev), a pint-sized, in-need-of-a-haircut Jimmy Dean, and they run about in the darkness, avoiding the lethal baseball bats of the shaven-headed local punks.

Then Clara predicts an earthquake, sending the townspeople packing and running. The scientists scoff, "Impossible." Is she a sham, or the real thing? You'll find out in Saint Clara's tender ending, "magic realism" as the youngsters smooch at the movies.

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"I think you make a masterpiece with the purpose of making a masterpiece," Lars von Trier said while discussing Stanley Kubrick in a 1990 interview. He rejected the notion that an important film arrives by accident, by modestly underachieving. "This film, my latest, it's produced as a masterpiece," he claimed of his third picture, Zentropa. "That's what it's meant to be."

Actually, Denmark's most important filmmaker since Carl Dreyer was striving for greatness even earlier in his career. Those who admire his Zentropa and Breaking the Waves will get an uncommon cinema treat September 9 through 11 at the Harvard Film Archive: a beautiful 35mm print of von Trier's amazingly accomplished, almost exhaustively inventive first work, from 1984, The Element of Crime.

His sepia-toned frames are cluttered with gauzy, decadently lit objects, the kind of bric-a-brac with which von Sternberg in the 1930s surrounded Marlene Dietrich. His formidable camera set-ups and intricate tracking shots emulate the 1940s and 1950s filmmaking heroics of Orson Welles. The "film noir" imagery -- watery, topsy-turvy, deep-focus, wide-angle -- and the sweaty, cadaverous characters are directly linked to Lady from Shanghai (those crumpled white summer suits) and, even more, Touch of Evil. Recall Touch of Evil's final chase, Charlton Heston's narc going after Welles's elephantine Hank Quinlan. Those weird sewer sets return here.

The Element of Crime is a wildly expressionist (also postmodern) effort. Ex-cop Fischer, who's delirious in Cairo, tells a feverish tale to a Sydney Greenstreet-looking Egyptian doctor with a parrot on his back. It's of his ignominious return, after 13 years, to an unnamed, diseased, water-logged northern European town.

Flashback. The ex-cop is recruited to locate a terrible child killer. He suspects the suspected-dead Harry Gray (surely an in-joke reference to Welles's thought-dead Harry Lime in The Third Man). How will he find Gray? By the scientific police method offered in the book The Element of Crime, in which the sleuth become the suspect, entering the suspect's mind, living his life.

In the postmodern detective tale, the cop on the trail is always the last to know. Is Fischer turning into Gray as he sleeps in Gray's hotel bed and takes on Gray's ex-mistress? Or, without being aware of it, has he been Gray all along? This Fischer, played by a beefy-faced, intentionally anonymous-looking actor, Michael Elphick, seems too thick to comprehend, the Singing Detective's dumb brother.

We sort of get the answer in a chilling climactic scene involving a little girl who recalls Peter Lorre's victims in M, that earlier masterpiece of European expressionism. In a postmodern way, The Element of Crime is another such masterpiece.

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When it rains, it storms at the Harvard Film Archive. There's another almost-unseen masterwork playing September 11 and 14: Satyajit Ray's 1969 Days and Nights in the Forest. Four spoiled Bombay brahmins make a country getaway that turns Chekhovian, Renoirian, and, finally, Shakespearean, as Ray approaches the transcendence of Shakespeare's restorative, Edenic, green-forest comedies.