And now some brief thoughts on this year’s Oscar-nominated short films. Starting with Live Action there is Ennemis Intérieurs, a French film that is set almost entirely in an interrogation room. A French officer of Algerian descent interviews a French-born Algerian seeking proper papers. It’s a tense, claustrophobic film with many fiery and well-acted exchanges. It assumes a little too much passing knowledge of the French/Algerian conflict, but is engaging nevertheless. It packs a lot of meaty material into a short time (racism, terrorism etc.) but fizzles a bit at the end. Solid.
La Femme et le TGV is lighter.
It’s about a lonely old woman who lives near the train tracks. Twice a day she
makes sure to never miss waving at the train as it passes her house. One day,
after decades of her routine, she finds a letter from the train’s conductor and
she strikes up a correspondence. There are other elements including her defunct
bakery, an estranged son, and a nice young man in town she keeps running into.
All of it is faux-Amélie agreeable.
Jane Birkin allows herself to be vulnerable in the part, but I couldn’t care
less about anything that happens in the story.
Silent
Nights is ghastly. It’s about a Danish woman volunteering at a homeless
shelter where she meets and falls in love with an immigrant from Ghana. This is
one of the phoniest, nonsensical shorts I’ve ever seen. At first it seems like
it might have something to say about the immigrant experience, but it abandons
that to focus on some extreme white privilege. The whole thing is impractical
and a little insulting with an embarrassing plot-hole that the entire thing
hinges upon. To be clear, I don’t object at all to the mixed race romance, it’s
just how poorly it’s deployed and engineered for maximum guilt relief. Awful.
Sing
is my second favorite of the group. It’s about a Hungarian girl moving to a
new school and joining the award-winning choir. She’s adjusting to new friends
and her new environment when she discovers a devastating secret about the
heralded choir teacher. It’s really honest and sweet about girl friendship.
Sections reminded me of Fucking Åmål.
And once the plot thickens, it gets straight to the conclusion without wasting time.
Too many shorts wish they weren’t, but Sing embraces the format and goes
out on a high note.
But the best of the group is Timecode. It’s the shortest and funniest
Live Action nominee. A female parking guard finds out what the nightshift does to pass
the time. She immediately finds herself passing messages to her counterpart
using the CCTV security footage. It all culminates in a bizarre and beautiful modern
art montage with one of the year’s best final lines. It’s my favorite kind of
short, gets in, makes a turn, and gets out with humor and grace.
The Animated Shorts category is the weakest it’s
been in years. Piper was in front of Finding Dory and therefore has the highest
profile of the nominees. It also happens to be the best of the group. I think it's PIXAR's best short since La Luna. It finally finds a story to go with their
photo-real experimentation. Cute, sweet, and funny with a deft touch. I’m most torn
on Pearl. It’s from Patrick Osborne
who won 2 years ago for the lovely Feast.
It’s the first VR nominee ever, which I really don’t give a flying fig about. I
want you to direct me where to look, not wander wherever. And I assume all
that extra animating is why the animation is kind of hideous. That said, it’s a
great conceit with a real emotional pull and that’s despite it feeling like a
Super Bowl car ad, but like, a really good Super Bowl ad.
Blind
Vaysha is the ‘80s post-modern experimental-looking film of the bunch. In
other words, the pretentious one. It’s about a girl born with one eye that sees
the past and one eye that sees the future. It has a great fairy tale quality
about it and some fantastic visuals, but it’s not the underground classic it
wishes it were. Borrowed Time is a western
about regret. It’s okay. The themes it’s trying to get at don’t really pop in
under 8 minutes. It feels like someone’s glorified thesis film. Lastly, there’s
Pear Cider and Cigarettes the longest
and most stylish of the nominees. It’s a biographical ode to the animator’s late, hard-living
friend. The photoshop animation is limited but used creatively. It’s raw,
honest, extremely personal, but meandering and lacking a real clear point. I wouldn’t
mind the aimlessness at a shorter length, but while admirable it starts to feel
indulgent.
This year, the least depressing Documentary
Short is the one about a holocaust survivor, Joe’s Violin. It’s also my least favorite. It’s about Joe Feingold
donating the violin he bought at the end of the war. It ends up at the Bronx Global Learning
Institute for Girls where it touches and inspires a talented young girl. When
Joe is recounting his past, the short is simple and powerful. Unfortunately,
the filmmakers sniff out the cloying high concept sitting right in front of
them. They force connections between the two owners and eventually manufacture
a meet and greet. It’s a very special NPR story with pictures.
Extremis is more straightforward but not
much better. It’s basically a few vignettes in a hospital involving doctors and
family members debating when to pull the plug on their loved ones.
We get it. Life is hard with hard decisions. The film offers little else. Though
it’s worth it for the utter disgust the doctor has on her face when someone
without a PhD tries to doctor-splain to her.
Which leaves 3 good to great docs
set in and around the Syrian crisis. Watani:
My Homeland is about a Syrian family forced to flee their country after their
father is kidnapped by ISIS. They end up in Germany where they must learn to
adapt to a war-free way of life. The Germany material isn’t quite as strong
because not much happens. But there are some interesting ideas here about where you
find home and what it means to leave one behind. 4.1 Miles is more broadly about the migrant crisis. It follows one
boat captain on the island of Lesbos and his daunting struggle to rescue
thousands of refugees from drowning in the Mediterranean. This is similar to
the feature doc nominee Fire at Sea. That
film spent way too much time trying to show island life. This isn’t as artistic
as Fire, but it makes up for it with bone-chilling immediacy. It sits on
the edge of heroism and futility in a striking way. Finally, there’s The White Helmets which is probably the
best doc short I’ve seen in 10 years. It’s about a group of first responders in
Aleppo. Civilian volunteers who run toward the bombs to sift through the rubble
for survivors. It’s not great solely based on subject matter though, it’s also crafted perfectly.
The footage captured is incredible. But it also weaves together talking head testimonials
with day to day camaraderie masterfully. To put it cheaply, it’s like the movie
Twister but with real, tragic stakes.
It’s the worst of humanity versus the best of us. It’s a great film.
And now I try to make some predictions. I think the subject
matter of Ennemis
Intérieurs makes it the
“important” pick, and my favorite, Timecode, will be too weird for some,
but I’m going with La Femme et
le TGV because of name
recognition and it’s the “pleasant” pick. PIXAR hasn’t won in forever, so it
could be due. However, I think enough people saw Pearl
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