AFI FILM FEST: A WINDOW ON SOME FAR SHORES : SATURDAY

“Alpine Fire” (Switzerland, 1986, 3:15 p.m.). Writer-director Freddie Meurer really knows how to hold an audience; this feature--about a rough-hewn farming family on an isolated Alpine mountain range--simmers with tensions, erotic and otherwise. The mountainside is cold, but the characters are hot; Meurer focuses on their everyday lives, and puts a lot of marvelously worked-out detail in their messy, isolated existence--while letting undercurrents of violence, betrayal and incest (between a deaf boy and his sister) gradually break out. Still, there’s something basically thin about the moral drama; it limits the film.