Pont de Varsòvia

“You’re stifled by rather precarious aesthetics,” one character says to another in Pere Portabella’s “Warsaw Bridge,” a film from 1990 that begins a weeklong run at the Museum of Modern Art on Friday. Aren’t we all? For his part Mr. Portabella seems pretty comfortable with his aesthetic of narrative enigma, elegant camerawork and attractive people who speak in literary and intellectual riddles.
A Catalan filmmaker whose recent work includes “The Silence Before Bach,” Mr. Portabella was for many years associated with Luis Buñuel. “Warsaw Bridge,” which takes place mostly in Barcelona (with a few scenes in Berlin), is not shy about declaring a debt to Buñuelian surrealism. This is especially true in several exquisite musical interludes, including one in which the members of an orchestra, housed in separate apartments, follow their conductor’s gestures on video monitors, and another set in a seragliolike bathhouse.
Connecting these images is an elusive story, or rather a series of events and conversations organized around a central anecdote. The body of a scuba diver is discovered in a burning forest, and while the mystery of his death is explained at the end, its resolution is not really the point of “Warsaw Bridge.” If the imagery and scenery suggest later Buñuel, the world-weary mood and suave discontinuity have more in common with the recent work of Jean-Luc Godard. Like Mr. Godard, Mr. Portabella clings to aesthetic principles — a commitment to difficulty, to seriousness, to scenes involving fine-boned women with grave expressions and without clothes — that can seem both fragile and complacent.
Da The New York Times, 13 giugno 2008