Sightings

By Emily Mitchell with bureau reports

MOVIES Peru

Along a Murderous Mountain Path

You Only Live Once

Written and directed by Marianne Eyde

WITH ITS FOUNDER JAILED more than a year ago and many of its leaders captured, the Shining Path insurgency is badly crippled. But to Peruvian officials, Sendero Luminoso remains a frightening specter. Norwegian-born filmmaker Marianne Eyde discovered that after she completed a film about Sendero in September 1992. For a year, the national film board nervously weighed the $150,000 movie's "artistic merit," and Eyde voluntarily screened You Only Live Once (La Vida Es Una Sola) for Peru's top military officers so they could see it was not pro-Sendero. Retired General Sinesio Jarama liked it, he told Eyde, but cautioned, "You're going to have problems because the film makes you think."

A second board, which routinely hands out ratings to pornographic movies, dallied five months before approving it in September for viewers over 18. "My film is a reflection on the disintegration of a society faced with violence," says the producer-director, who has lived in Peru for 20 years. The insurgency's effects are seen through the fictional Andean village of Rayopampa. By enticing its young people into their movement and provoking the military, the Senderistas force everyone to take sides, creating deadly divisions. Though the story is fictional, the tragic reality is that similar scenarios mark Shining Path's 13 years of terror. The film has now opened in Peru, drawing favorable critical reaction -- but so far few moviegoers.

Britain

Homeless Nocturne

Naked

Written and directed by Mike Leigh

MEET JOHNNY, THE INTELLIGENT, NIHIListic protagonist of Naked. The first view of him could not be more savage. In a dark, scabrous alley he has shoved a woman against a wall and is raping her. For the next two hours, he stumbles through a London nighttown of despairing, inarticulate souls, watching with embittered eyes and delivering mordant, nonstop opinions on everything from Homer to Nostradamus to the Berlin Wall. When last seen, he has been severely beaten and is limping down the middle of a suburban street in an eerie dance to nowhere. As he says, there are plenty of places to go, the problem is where to stay. In the moral and spiritual sense, Johnny is truly a homeless man.

Director Mike Leigh, a veteran of TV, stage and movies, works idiosyncratically, letting plot and character evolve from improvisations and brainstorming sessions with his cast. Over a period of weeks, a taut shooting script emerges. The result is depressing and uncompromising. In Britain Naked's unredeemed hostility is straining the loyalty of Leigh's many admirers. In Cannes, however, the film won him the Best Director award this year, and David Thewlis, who is brilliant as rotten Johnny, was named Best Actor. Life for Leigh's lower-class mates is nasty and brutish; women are doormats and men are misogynists. The director does not ask for sympathy for Naked's characters, and the audience feels none. Once met, though, Johnny cannot be forgotten.

BOOKS India

Thicker Than Water

The Last Burden by Upamanyu Chatterjee; Penguin India; 303 pages; $8

A WRITER WHOSE FIRST book makes a splash is often seized with the fear that the second will sink like a stone to the depths of the literary pond. Upamanyu Chatterjee was broadly praised for his 1988 novel, English, August, about a bored junior bureaucrat in a dusty Indian town. Because he was considered a serious challenger to Vikram Seth as the country's most popular novelist, Indian readers awaited Chatterjee's new book impatiently. Brisk sales, however, do not mask the fact that reviews are mixed. Critics called it "beautiful" and "heartbreaking" but found the dense prose tough going. The Last Burden, wrote the daily Pioneer, "is clearly a burden on the mind."

In Chatterjee's work, family ties are painful bonds. Summoned to the bedside of his dying mother, a jaded young civil servant returns to family bickering and breakdown. Rowing relatives are familiar in today's bourgeois Indian families, where generational conflicts make for complaints and arguments that usually end with maternal tears or paternal rage. Writes Chatterjee: "Underneath the horn-rimmed spectacles, the lipstick, dentures, necklaces, earrings, cuff links, watch straps -- inside everyone are scuttled those hundreds and thousands of trivial catastrophes." He magnifies these small disturbances, but they eventually clutter the view. As novelist Firdaus Kanga observed in the Independent on Sunday, the book is "half brilliant and wholly harrowing."

EXHIBITS United States

More Things in Heaven and Earth

Face of the Gods

Museum for African Art, New York City

DISPLAYED IN A SECULAR space, sacred art almost invariably loses mystery and power. But at New York City's Museum for African Art, devotional altars on exhibit from Africa, the Caribbean and South America retain their strong emotional content. One reason they have traveled well may be that the exhibit represents a syncretism of migrating cultures. Yoruba and Kongo religions crossed the Atlantic with abducted slaves; replenished by elements borrowed from Catholicism and Native American practice, they took vigorous root and flourished in a new world.

Along with 19th century Nigerian objects, the show has several altars made by contemporary artist-believers in Brazil's Candomble and the Afro-Cuban Santeria religion. From Bahia comes a three-tiered platform with offerings left in pottery vessels so Omolu, the god of disease, will combat AIDS. A personal altar by a Cuban now living in the Bronx incorporates beads, shells, feathers, bones, tools -- all drawn from Kongo culture. A tall tree illustrates how the African custom of surrounding a grave with plates attached to sticks was translated in the American South into the practice of fastening bottles on branches to imprison negative spirits. The show, which will tour other U.S. cities after Jan. 7, closes with a striking re-creation of the miniature shrines made on Rio de Janeiro beaches by thousands of New Year's Eve celebrators to honor Yemoja and Oshun, the goddesses of water and love. Small cavities scooped in the sand hold white candles, white roses and champagne. Individual Atlantic altars, they connect past to present.