FESTIVAL ‘ 90 : Today’s Film Highlights

Daughter of the Nile

Taiwan Laemmle Grande, 349 Figueroa St., 6 p.m. This film reminds us that, especially in movies, art can be found in unlikely places. It’s a violent teen-age melodrama whose plot and title derive from a popular Asian comic strip, whose lead actors include two famous pop singers and the owner of a trendy Taipei boutique, and whose fictional heroine works in a Taiwanese branch of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Does that sound like a recipe for disaster?

Instead, Hou Hsiao-hsien turns it into an evocative, painful juvenile delinquent drama, whose characters--a beleaguered student, her criminal brother and his psychopathic chum--spin, inevitably but realistically, down into death or defeat. Hou’s style here has an almost freezing dispassion. He never lingers on chaos. He shows it simply--and swiftly moves on. The effect can be annihilating.