Los Angeles Film Festival

ROMÁNTICO (USA)

If ever a life was defined by Sisyphean struggle it’s that of Carmelo, an itinerant mariachi who works San Francisco’s Mission District, cranking out melancholy love songs with his beloved but sporadically drunk partner, Arturo. Caught between dire poverty and the desire to keep his suffering family together, the 57-year-old Carmelo must choose between making $100 on a good night in an American city and 30 pesos a day — an improvement on his hardscrabble childhood — servicing weddings in his down-at-heel Mexican town. Mark Becker spent more than three years following Carmelo back and forth, and the result is a rich, devastating portrait of a man gifted with great charm and burdened by the painful combination of determination and fatalism that so often comes with adversity. Inventively shot on 16mm, Románticoechoes the changing rhythms of Carmelo’s world. If this terrific documentary doesn’t adjust your idea of what it means to have a hard life and a good attitude, you haven’t been paying attention. (Sunset 5, Fri., June 17, 7 p.m.; Sunset 5, Fri., June 24, 10 p.m.)

—Ella Taylor

NINE LIVES (USA)

A troubled woman (Lisa Gay Hamilton) who was abused by her father as a child revisits the home where she grew up and, for a moment, recaptures her lost innocence; an ex-wife (Amy Brenneman) finds herself falling back in love with her ex-husband (William Fichtner) on the occasion of his second wife’s funeral; and a mother (Glenn Close) spends the afternoon visiting a family cemetery plot in the company of her precocious young daughter. Those are but three of the Nine Livescanvassed by writer-director Rodrigo García over the course of his new ensemble drama. As with his 2002 debut feature, Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, García (the son of Gabriel García Márquez) adopts a cinematic form less novelistic than it is a collection of short stories — some interrelated, others stand-alone, and each is filmed as a single unedited tracking shot. Though a few of García’s tales — which range from melodrama to farce, and yes, even magic realism- — are inevitably more compelling than the rest, the nine female characters who form the stories’ centers are all remarkable creations, as are the gifted (and largely under-appreciated) actresses who play them. (In addition to those mentioned: Kathy Baker, Holly Hunter, Molly Parker and Mary Kay Place are also onboard.) In the film’s most plangent scene, two old flames (Robin Wright Penn and Jason Isaacs) reminisce about a relationship that was “lovely in fits and starts” as they traverse the aisles of a grocery store — its shelves seemingly stocked not with dry goods, but with the emotional ramparts of their shared past. (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Tues., June 21, 7 p.m.)

—Scott Foundas

Needy Girl's "Chromeo" video
MUSIC VIDEO SHOWCASE

The two Eclectic Mix programs in LAFF’s inspired festival sidebar represent a carefully assembled buffet of artists, genres and visual styles. The collections work in tandem to highlight the fact that — contrary to the looped formulas you see on MTV — some very inventive work is being done in the field of music videos, among it Badly Drawn Boy’s “Year of the Rat,” Orisha’s “Naci Orishas,” the unedited version of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” and Los Abandoned’s “Van Nuys (Es Very Nice),” which subversively placates fears about the Latinization of L.A. by placing the Latino alterna-rock outfit (clad in Silver Lake–hipster thrift-store chic) in the midst of a high school cheerleading practice full of charmingly bumbling young Latinas, then interspersing the performance footage with images of Latino families performing all-American acts of shopping, eating and just chilling in the market square. But if you can only catch one video showcase, make it She Said: The Music Videos of Floria Sigismondi, a retrospective of the work of the celebrated visual artist who brings her interests in surrealism and the avant-garde to the music clips she helms. In particular, Sigismondi’s fascination with the remnants of beauty that cling to decay and destruction (as found in devastated landscapes and bombed-out buildings) marks the minifilms she makes. Marilyn Manson’s “Beautiful People” and Christina Aguilera’s “Fighter” are probably the best-known examples of her work (and proof of the extremes within which she’s comfortable working), but there’s also exquisite imagery in clips she’s done for Tricky, Leonard Cohen, The Cure and underground R&B cult goddess Amel Larrieux. A highlight is her “( )” video for Sigur Ros, in which the viewer is slowly transported from what seems like the interior of a boarding school for young, solemn-faced kids to a barren, otherworldly landscape where the kids trash a burned-out old car in slow motion. As we’re slowly drawn into an unfamiliar setting of despair and violence, the effect is simultaneously discomfiting and oddly soothing.