Belle Epoque [VHS]

This Spanish fluff from 1992 won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but its significance goes about as far as you can throw a flower petal. The story finds an elderly artist (Fernando Fernán Gómez) giving shelter to a deserter (Jorge Sanz) from the royalist army in provincial Spain, 1931. While on the premises, the young man naturally notes the beauty of all four of his host's daughters. Each takes her turn at seducing him, but this isn't late-night cable TV so much as it is a series of brief character sketches filled out by the way each woman takes charge. It's a clever idea made more clever by the fact that these sundry beauties are acting on the libertine impulses to which their free-thinking father subscribes in principle but has sheepishly abandoned for love. But the film, directed by Fernando Trueba, is rendered so lightly it could almost be mistaken for calendar art. --Tom Keogh