Series/Festivals

The Celluloid Couch. The St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute presents a series on movies and their psychological implications. This week features François Ozon's Under the Sand (2000). In French director Ozon's beautifully acted, carefully written meditation on grief, the persistence of desire and the power of denial, a middle-aged husband (Bruno Cremer) vanishes during a summer afternoon at the beach. His devoted British-born wife, Marie (Charlotte Rampling), is left to cope with the mystery (suicide? drowning? flight?) and with his phantom, who is less ghost than nagging memory. She imagines her Jean drowsing in their bed, chatting at the breakfast table, inhabiting the present tense in every way. Has Marie's consciousness commingled with his, as in the Virgina Woolf novel she's teaching to her Paris lit students? Ozon (Water Drops on Burning Rocks) knows better than to tell all, and the tension remains high. With Jacques Nolot as the inevitable new man in the obsessed heroine's life. Plays at 7 p.m. May 3 at the St. Louis Art Museum. (BG)

Cinema in the City. Webster University sponsors once-a-month Wednesday screenings in Beatnik Bob's Cafe. This month features Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle's 1935 adaptation of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Starring Mickey Rooney as Puck, James Cagney as Bottom and Jean Muir as Helena, this early take on Shakespeare's classic romantic comedy offers magic flowers that cause love at first sight, resulting in Cupid-inspired confusion deep within a heavenly forest. Plays at 7:30 p.m. May 1 at Beatnik Bob's Cafe, City Museum, 15th and Lucas streets. NR