At $3 a ticket, Vanderbilt’s Sarratt Cinema is both one of Nashville’s cheapest dates and biggest bargains. Every semester, Sarratt bats cleanup for Nashville’s commercial theaters, bringing not only foreign movies that have somehow slipped through the net of local cinemas but also first-run documentaries, classics, midnight movies and commercial blockbusters.

If you haven’t picked up one of Sarratt’s fall schedules, we’ve isolated a few of the fall semester’s best selections, ranging from black comedies to exotic documentaries. Although every week at Sarratt this fall features something worthwhile, the following are titles you shouldn’t miss.

The Fat of the Land (Sunday, Sept. 3) A documentary about the Lard Car—a 1984 Chevy diesel van that actually runs on used vegetable oil. Five female filmmakers led by Niki Cousino took the van on a cross-country odyssey, gathering their fatty fuel at the greasy spoons and burger joints of roadside America. The Sarratt screening will be one of the country’s first—and yes, the Lard Car itself will be at Sarratt, where Cousino will lead a post-screening discussion.

Before the Rain (Sept. 5-6) Many critics felt this Macedonian drama should have won last year’s Oscar for best foreign film, which went instead to Nikita Mikhalkov’s searing Burnt by the Sun (which shows at Sarratt in December). This marks the Nashville premiere of director Milcho Manchevski’s film, which involves a monk who renounces his calling for a refugee.

(Sept. 11-12) After bombing badly at his Las Vegas debut, the son (Oliver Platt) of a legendary comedian (Jerry Lewis) returns to his ancestral roots in England to discover the secret of being funny. Instead, he uncovers skeletons in his family’s past that endanger his life. A macabre black comedy from director Peter Chelsom () that features the debut performance of astounding physical comic Lee Evans.

and The Earrings of Madame de... (Sept. 24 and 25) Two seldom-screened movies by Max Ophuls, the French director whose films are noted for their sumptuous romantic gloss and constantly roving cinematography. 1950’s follows a chain of lovers in fin de siècle Vienna who pass from one illicit romance to the next before ultimately coming full circle; 1953’s The Earrings of Madame de... concerns a fickle woman (Danielle Darrieux) who pawns the earrings her husband gives her, only to receive them again at the hands of her true love (Italian neo-realist director Vittorio de Sica) with tragic results. The latter is not available at local video stores, and the chance to see it on a big screen—especially in a restored 35mm print—should not be missed.

Latcho Drom (Oct. 1-2) Many people have asked when this film would come to Nashville. A treasure for fans of world music and exotic locales, Tony Gatliff’s colorful documentary plunges into the world of gypsy culture, following gypsy musicians and dancers from India, Egypt, Turkey, Romania, France and Spain.

Once Were Warriors (Oct. 3-4) A devastating drama from New Zealand director Lee Tamahori, who records the disintegration of a Maori family crowded into a dispiriting ghetto in pitiless detail. Despite the downbeat subject matter, Tamahori’s technique is furiously kinetic, and Rena Owen’s performance as a wife pushed beyond endurance by her husband’s brutality and self-loathing ranks with the year’s best. Not to be missed.

(Oct. 29) One of Preston Sturges’ most inventive comedies, this dark-humored 1948 tale concerns a jealous conductor (Rex Harrison) who fantasizes killing the wife (Linda Darnell) he believes to have cuckolded him; with each new piece of music he conducts, he devises a different murderous scenario. A near-perfect mixture of high and low comedy, with Harrison taking some expert pratfalls.

I Am Cuba (Nov. 13-15) Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov traveled to Cuba just before the Cuban missile crisis to make a propaganda film; the result, after three years in collaboration with Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Cuban novelist Enrique Pineda Barnet, is regarded as “a fabulous monster”—a stunningly photographed, sprawling portrait of Cuban life from resorts to tenements. Not released in the U.S. until this year—and then only with the efforts of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola—this may be your only chance ever to see it.

Safe (Dec. 18-19) Julianne Moore () portrays a housewife convinced that toxins in the air and water are slowly destroying her; in desperation, she flees to a clinic whose New Age mysticism proves to be cold comfort. Directed by Todd Haynes (Poison).

Other highlights include filmmaker Joel Kaminsky presenting his post-Holocaust documentary (Oct. 22); two restored films by the great Indian director Satyajit Ray, Deví and The Middleman (Nov. 5-6); Joel and Ethan Coen’s The President’s Lady (Dec. 17). For more information, contact Sarratt at 322-2425 or stop by the Sarratt main desk and pick up a schedule.—Jim Ridley

Belles Lettres

Luis Buñuel devoted his career to tweaking the naughty expectations of his audience, and his 1967 masterpiece Belle de Jour is a mischievous, sublime meditation on the pleasures and perils of vicarious degradation. Its heroine, Séverine, a virginal housewife frustrated by her husband’s touch and racked by masochistic fantasies, is drawn to the door of an exclusive brothel; once inside, she takes the name Belle de Jour and surrenders herself wholly to the whims of her clients. She maintains her parallel lives contentedly until she entrances a jealous, violent patron, Marcel, who destroys her fantasy world by refusing to treat her strictly as a commodity. Buñuel’s masterstroke was to cast Catherine Deneuve, the embodiment of unsullied, aristocratic beauty, as Séverine; the sight of well-to-do moviegoers lined up at the Belcourt to see the pristine Deneuve defiled is an irony the director would have appreciated.

No one skewered the absurdities of bourgeois appetites more fondly or astutely than Buñuel, and in Belle de Jour he pricks the complacency at the heart of class-bound fantasies of revolt and freedom. Séverine may fantasize, in the movie’s still shocking (and hilarious) opening, that she’s being beaten and ravished by coachmen, but their whips leave no marks. They can’t, or it wouldn’t be fun. By joining the brothel, she gets to have the abandon and debasement she craves, but with the control she would never think of surrendering. (The more control she assumes at the brothel, the more passive she becomes in her fantasies; Buñuel’s men see women, particularly Séverine/Belle/Deneuve, as blank screens upon which to project their desires.) She even sets her own schedule—2 to 5 every afternoon, strict time. That’s bourgeois liberation for you: depravity with regular office hours.

Buñuel understood Séverine’s need for control, however, as only an old surrealist could. By the time he made Belle de Jour, the great Spanish director was 67, and he had settled into a wonderful late period that on the surface seemed far removed from the free-swinging anarchy of Un Chien Andalou. But his orderly approach to disorder was in fact the ultimate surrealist prank: Audiences today are more bewildered than ever by Buñuel’s poker-faced handling of taboo material. As fluidly as Buñuel’s images flow, there’s something irreducibly mysterious and funny about these late films: Little flourishes like the bells that precede Séverine’s fantasies (a droll aural pun) and the feline motif in her erotic dreams can’t be entirely explained away—they hold together without making sense. The exquisite formality and beautifully clearheaded style of Belle de Jour only make the outrageous proceedings more inexplicable—it’s like looking at a Japanese garden in which intricate designs reveal filthy messages.

The strangest thing about watching the once scandalous Belle de Jour now, however, is how commonplace its perversities seem. Japes about sadomasochism are the stuff of sitcom humor these days, and housewives turned prostitutes—or worse—are staples of made-for-cable movies and talk shows. Audiences now are so casually acceptive of debasement that a mainstream entertainment like the wretched can open with a little girl being tortured—something more horrible than anything Luis Buñuel ever devised—and nobody blinks. If anything, Belle de Jour makes you oddly nostalgic for the good old days of depravity.—Jim Ridley

Unbearable

I’ll be the first to admit that the panda is an adorable animal—tumbling around, eating bamboo, going “panda, panda, panda” (the noise it makes when it walks). But is it enough to build a movie around? Or, more to the point, does static panda footage interspliced with shots of an unlikable American actor running with a panda doll in his arms constitute an adventure?

The Amazing Panda Adventure stars Ryan Slater (younger brother of Christian) as a grumpy preteen who travels to China to spend time with his distracted environmentalist dad. He’s barely been in the country an hour before a hunt for panda-poachers goes horribly awry, leaving Slater stranded in the forest with a preteen Chinese girl and a dying panda cub. What ensues is a series of close scrapes, as the two kids scurry to get the cub back to his mother while avoiding the persistent poachers.

Yes, this is innocuous family fare, and yes the panda cub is fairly cute (although anytime the little fella is in danger, someone simply tosses a stuffed panda stand-in to director Christopher Cain, who promptly drops it off a cliff or a bridge). But what happened to the grandeur, cleverness and intelligence that used to be the hallmark of cinematic adventures, from Star Wars to The Man Who Would Be King? The characters rarely do anything more resourceful than run like hell. When did “adventure” devolve into mere scrambling, mere survival?

My suggestion for future panda films? Write a better script, and don’t spare the pandas! Also, study some bright recent children’s films like The Sandlot and The Indian in the Cupboard something. Let’s stop the cheapening of the word “adventure” before the genre itself becomes an endangered species.—