Series Opener ‘Lilies’ Shows Its Stage Roots

The UCLA Film Archive’s “Borderlines: New Canadian Cinema” gets off to a dispiriting start Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Theater with John Greyson’s “Lilies.”

It’s the old story: You can imagine “Lilies” working on stage (it’s based on Michel Marc Bouchard’s 1987 play), but this screen version is so close to being a filmed play that it has an aura of artificiality that allows it to lapse into tedium.

It’s Quebec, 1952, and a bishop has been summoned to hear the confession of a supposedly dying convict, imprisoned for 40 years. Sure enough, the bishop and the convict were schoolmates, and they and another student were caught up in a lethal entanglement of homosexual passion, which via flashbacks is played out in stylized, sometimes surreal fashion heavy with symbolism--it’s not for nothing that the youths are seen enacting the martyrdom of St. Sebastian.

The cast, which includes men playing female roles, is clearly able and at times affecting, but rarely are we unaware that the actors are acting rather than becoming the characters they portray. Information: (310) 206-FILM.

From Germany: Meanwhile, the American Cinematheque’s “New Films From Germany” continues at Raleigh Studios Friday at 7 p.m. with Gordian Maugg’s “The Caucasian Night,” a stunning instance of a good-natured satire gradually evolving into an unexpectedly powerful emotional experience in an increasingly venturesome style.

With a strong background in documentary films, Maugg, 30, is a writer-director of major promise. It’s summer, 1990, and a manager (Winfried Glatzeder) of a porcelain factory in newly reunited Berlin has arrived in Moscow with his wife (Verena Plangger) and 16-year-old son, Stefan (Robert Schielke), on a deal to reorganize a Moscow plant to turn out industrial china cheaply.

Of course, everything goes comically wrong--indeed, the plant’s hearty, hospitable Georgian proprietor (Elgudscha Burduli) turns out beautiful, handcrafted ceramics in the manner of his native region. Meanwhile, the proprietor’s own teenage son Tengis (David Iaschwili), a romantic and mystic, obsesses on Stefan in a relationship fraught with ambiguity and a fragility symbolic of the precariousness of life in Russia as the fall of the USSR approaches.

That Stefan’s father is so likable despite his profit-mindedness invests him with a kind of terrible innocence. It’s not for nothing that a feisty, elderly World War II heroine exclaims upon the arrival of the Germans: “One invasion of our sacred soil was enough.”

Information: (213) 466-FILM.

Marion’s Birthday: Publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst always overshadowed the career of the love of his life, Marion Davies, featuring her in lavish film productions that tended to overwhelm her engaging personality and very real talent as a comedian.

To mark the centennial of her birth, the Silent Movie will present Saturday at 8 p.m. “Peg o’ My Heart,” a 1933 talkie, semi-musical version of the 1914 play (previously filmed in 1919 and 1922) made famous by Laurette Taylor.

It’s a dated business about an Irish lass turned unexpected heiress and exploited cruelly by her aristocratic but impoverished English relatives. Nonetheless, Davies is radiant, adorable--and displays a delightful singing voice.

The Silent Movie is also showing on Wednesday a 1916 Mary Pickford picture, “Poor Little Peppina,” unseen for 80 years, and on Friday, Cecil B. DeMille’s sophisticated and stylish--and beautifully tinted--1921 “The Affairs of Anatol,” adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s play and starring Wallace Reid, Gloria Swanson and Bebe Daniels. Information: (213) 653-2389.

Triple Threat Richard Brody’s awkwardly titled “Liability Crisis” (Sunset 5, Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m.) wears its IQ on its sleeve as it depicts a brilliant young man (Jim Helsinger), an aspiring filmmaker who finds his obsession with the Holocaust, grappling with his Jewish identity and his mother’s conservatism is driving away his lover, a beautiful young emigre from the former Yugoslavia.

Information: (213) 848-3500.