A Moment in the Sun

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

It begins with two policemen falling into a comic argument over whether to let their prisoner, an army deserter, escape. The quarrel leads to one of them killing the other and then committing suicide. It climaxes with a priest -- a worldly and genial man -- hanging himself in his church. He has fallen into despair after too profound an exposure to the antireligious writings of the poet-philosopher Miguel de Unamuno.

Between these two events, the young deserter, Fernando (the wide-eyed Jorge Sanz), having been given shelter by a retired painter and full-time ironist (superbly played by Fernando Fernan Gomez), seduces, or is seduced by, all four of the old man's lovely daughters.

In short, Belle Epoque, an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film, is a very ^ funny movie. Yes, really. For there's a little bit of Luis Bunuel nestled in the heart of every Spaniard, something at once black and farcical, and director Fernando Trueba is no exception. He also loves the sun-splashed romanticism of Jean Renoir; the film's cheerful look, its air of bemused wonder at the things people do when the time is right for frolic, is a homage to that most civilized of directors.

And the time is indeed right. For the title refers to that brief moment in 1931 when the Spanish Republic was proclaimed, ending the long night of decadent monarchy and preceding the still darker night of civil war and Francoism. It was a historical nanosecond when everyone felt frisky intellectually and emotionally, and this surprising film, which wears its complexities so lightly, pays sweet tribute to that spirit. It is rendered the more poignant by our knowledge -- not, of course, shared by the characters -- of how brief and repressible their irrepressibility would prove to be.