In decay, an eerie beauty

It's hard not to notice a theme of solitude and self-discovery among the films. Although the journeys are varied in tone and character, there's also a sense of almost subconscious connections between the films. A powerful long shot such as the one of Loden's soul-deadened housewife in "Wanda" traversing a grim coalfield has a decades-later corollary in Menkes' dreamlike "Phantom Love," in which her lonely and bitter protagonist, a casino worker in L.A.'s Koreatown, occasionally is shown crossing a bridge in India crowded with natives.

"La-bas (Down There)" is the most austere of this reflective bunch, a claustrophobic documentary in which Akerman points her camera out the window of a Tel Aviv apartment toward her neighbors and occasionally comments, with gravelly breathlessness, on Jewishness, Israel and her conflicted feelings about how to engage with the world. A candid work framed by a hesitant voyeurism -- there's usually a screen between the camera and the nearby buildings -- it won't win new converts to the prolific feminist icon, but it dovetails well with Akerman's recent geographically minded forays.

The liveliest female-centric adventure, however, is Biller's "Viva," a meticulously designed re-imagining of "classy"-minded '70s-era soft porn -- boy meets girl, but more important, girl meets free love -- that pays as much attention to the realities of the sexual revolution for women as it does the get-it-on aura of wet-bar aesthetics, polyester, peekaboo nudity and color-saturated interior decor. It converts an earlier male generation's notion of swinger gratification into the pitfalls for females of the unfulfilled tease.

Biller stars (and strips) as a neglected Los Angeles housewife named Barbi who experiments with looser sexuality by becoming a call girl, only to find that her fantasies and those of the men she encounters hardly mesh.

Simply put, the movie pops with parodic joy -- in the hoary double-entendres and presentational acting styles -- and hotly lighted 35-millimeter cinematography that evokes lounge music album covers and Playboy ads.

Short shorts

The Very Short Movies Festival, happening next weekend at the Egyptian, will present new works, recent films that have won awards and shorts by now-established studio filmmakers.