The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 25

THE GUARDIAN Thursday August 19 1993 Mew Ibeaitt to sm oDdl tairae EL MARIACHI Dir: Robert Rodriguez With Carlos Gallardo, Consuelo Gomez 81 mins. cert 15. Screen on the Green; MGM Tottenham Court Road LAWS OF (SUAVITY Dir: Nick Gomez With Peter Greene. Eddie Falco 100 minutes.cert 18. Gate Notting Hill LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS Dir: Marcel Carne With Arletty, Pierre Brasseur, Jean-Louis Barrautt 190 mins, cert PG.

Renoir. Clapham Picture House HOT SHOTS, PART DEUX Dir: Jim Abrahams With Charlie Sheen. Lloyd Bridges 87 mins, cert 12. MGM Chelsea, etc LAKE CONSEOUENCE Dir: Rafael Eisenman With Joan Severance, Billy Zane 90 mins, cert 18. MGM Trocadero etc STEPPING RAZOR: RED Dir.

Nicholas Campbell With Peter Tosh 92 minutes, cert 18. Electric after him. Besides, her clients love him, and in the end she does too. Meanwhile, we know why the mariachi is being chased, even if he doesn't. There's another man carrying a guitar case in town, and his is full of weaponry.

It's a case of mistaken identity. One should always beware of overpraising a film simply because of the circumstances of its making. But Rodriguez's ability to keep his story simple and to embellish it not with any. pretension but with the liveli-nessofhis camerawork and editing is certainly something to write home about. You can easily forgive the occasional lapses into slow motion or speeded up sequences as, for the most part, El Mariachi bubbles along, making bows in different directions with what looks like an assured belief in itself and the ability of the cinema to make any number of stale cliches into something fresh.

This is clearly the debut of a real filmmaker. You could ascribe this first feature as paying homage to anybody from Sergio Leone to the Coen Brothers. Laws Of Gravity, which was made for the vast sum of $38,000 in 11 days by writer-director Nick Gomez, clearly owes its main debt to David Mamet and Martin Scorsese. Carlos Gallardo as EI Mariachi Derek Malcolm THERE ARE some extremely poor films that cost more than most of us could possibly earn in a lifetime, and a few highly watchable movies put together for virtually nothing. Robert Rodriguez says he spent around $7,000 on shooting El Mariachi, and since his name appears on the published credits no less than 11 times, one is inclined to believe that he cost himself practically nothing.

The result, even if the cost had been $7 million, would have been creditable. But, as it is, this virtually one-man show, which has pitched Rodriguez into a two-year production deal with Columbia, has the life and conviction of everyone's favourite B-movie. The kind of film, in fact, that they don't make anymore today. The mariachi of the title is a young man (the appealing Carlos Gallardo) looking for work in the bars of a small Mexican border town. In the first one, the owner has a synthesiser doing the job, in the second the beautiful female owner (Consuelo Gomez) is down on her luck and can't afford him.

In the end, however, she takes him in since it appears that someone is relief to Tim Pope's Phone, a 30-min-ute short on the same programme based, it is said, on the transcript of a prankster phone call and calling in all the director's experience as a video-maker to bend the imagination in weird directions. It is perhaps unfortunate for any of the new films that Marcel Carne's Les Enfants Du Paradis is revived this week, since it personifies in its admittedly theatrical form (but extraordinarily wide-ranging content) almost everything the cinema seems to have lost over the last quarter of a century or so. The fact that we have gained something too is also obvious. Carne and Jacques Prevert's film isn't cinematic in the way even the second-rate often manages to be nowadays. But its ability to make its characters live through other means, and to represent so much more than the sum of their parts, still has the undeniable air of a classic evocation not only of an era but of the emotional complexities of its characters.

Set on the theatrical boulevards of the 19th century Paris of Louis Philippe (the children of paradise are those who inhabit the cheaper balconies of the theatres), the film is at once intimate and epic. It is almost accurate to call it the French Gone With The Wind, equipped with won derful performances and an eye for detail superbly embellished by Alexander Trauner's art direction. At the time of its making during the Occupation, its importance lay principally in its disguised allegory about the Resistance. But now we witness not that but the more timeless appeal of a story of love and jealousy and tragic misunderstandings that marries the artifice of the theatre to the realities of life as well as it has ever been done. No film I know has quite so successfully told us of the relevance of another art and, come to that, very few plays have either.

The warning must be that you have to change your mental gear a little to reach the film's subtleties and that can be hard if you don't know anything much about the French cinema before the New Wave scuttled most of its most cherished tenets. But if you can do that, Les Enfants remains a masterpiece 190 minutes during which Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur and Maria Cesares provide what used to be called "poetic realism" with one of its greatest triumphs. Hot Shots! Part Deux is Jim Abrahams at it again, this time with Charlie Sheen as a Rambo-Iike secret agent pitted against Saddam H. The result is utterly predictable but Set on the streets of Brooklyn, it has a group of post-adolescent friends searching for a way out of nowhere and one in particular, who has failed to answer a court summons, getting deeper and deeper into the pit. The result is predictable violence and a lesson learnt too late.

The film is as talkative as El Mariachi is determined that actions will speak louder than words and what Gomez attempts to accomplish is the kind of reality that Mean Streets actually managed to transcend. What the film achieves is a stunning if rather grinding portrait of a posse of small-time hucksters who are no better than society makes them, and sometimes worse. Gomez is good on group loyalties, on the way their women have to put up with macho posing disguising weakness, and he also grades his characters according to their maturity and awareness with considerable skill. Certainly the performances, particularly from Peter Greene and Adam Trese are notable, but the women too make their mark. This is a nightmare world where so few are in full control of their emotions that what eventually happens takes on an air of inevitability that reminds one of Greek tragedy.

But there is an element of grind about it, and one turns with some CD QCdctO LFUictBc?).