Oscar season means many things to many people, but one of the best is that, thanks to the folks at Shorts HD, it’s the only time all year that most of us have even the smallest opportunity to see short films on the big screen And that is something I look forward to every year with enormous enthusiasm. So without further ado, allow me to dive right into the matter of the five films nominated for Best Live-Action Short, and now screening here and there throughout the country, in advance of a VOD run sometime soon.
“But Tim,” you are undoubtedly about to ask (irrespective of the fact that I do not live in your computer & cannot hear you), “you’re such an animation buff. Why aren’t you reviewing the animated shorts?” Well, don’t forget, while I’m merely a lusty, amateur animation buff over here, I’m actually a professional animation buff over at the Film Experience. And that’s where you can find my thoughts on the other slate.
Aya (Oded Binnun and Mihal Brezis, Israel / France)
If I have it right, this is the current frontrunner to win in the eyes of most pundits. And I won’t claim that I feel unmixedly good about that – it’s one of the weaker films of a generally strong slate. That’s less because of anything specific it does wrong, and more because it’s simply not very focused or thoughtful about how it wants to tell its story: at 40 minutes, it’s not only the longest of the nominees, it’s also brushing against the Academy’s definition of “short film” rather recklessly. Nor are all 40 of those minutes used to equally good effect. There’s a lot of time spent on conversations that are a bit more indulgent than they frankly need to be.
The titular Aya (Sarah Adler) is waiting to pick someone up at the airport when she’s mistaken by a Danish scholar named Overby (Ulrich Thomsen) as his driver; she refuses to correct him until miles into their drive to Jerusalem, at which point he doesn’t seem to care much. The film eventually reveals itself as a parable of dissatisfied people seeking new connections, but it relies an awful lot on a kind-of twist ending to make most of that clear, which leaves a lot of scenes of talking about nothing in particular, all set in the front seat of a car. There’s goodness and insight within the film, though it needs to be ferreted out of the bloat, and the characters who always feel a bit more like screenwriting conceits than psychologies. 6/10
Boogaloo and Graham (Michael Lennox and Ronan Blaney, UK)
Can’t have the Oscars without darling children getting into light scrapes while something serious burbles on unseen in the background. “Something serious”, in this case, is the Troubles; the 1970s Belfast-set film manages to wedge in a late scene involving a political prisoner and the violence of the region that is all the more garish for how much the film otherwise has not the smallest interest in the political or social ramifications of its setting. And boy, was I ever ready to go harsh on it.
But then, as darling children movies go, Boogaloo and Graham – named for the pet chickens given to a pair of young brothers (Riley Hamilton and Aaron Lynch) by their father (Martin McCann) in a fit of poor judgment – has the benefit of actual darlings, with just enough snarky spike in their personalities that it’s not just the cloying sitcom nonsense it so readily could have been. Its insights into human behavior are trite, and the punchline at the end – if that’s the word for something so calm and subdued and philosophically Irish – suggests that the film doesn’t really know what it’s trying to be about, either. But as a snapshot of a quirky family, it has its pleasures, even if it is undoubtedly the weakest thing here. 6/10
Butter Lamp (Hu Wei and Julien Féret, France / China)
Okay, we’re starting to get to the really good stuff. Once again, we have here a film that doesn’t announce its meaning until the final moments of the final shot, but in this case, it’s a much more effective strategy, allowing the film to build up a sense of mystery along with its rather effective charm. We find a rarely-seen, but constantly chatting photographer (Genden Punstock) positioning groups and individuals from a Tibetan village in front of his portable backdrops (the film camera adopts the perspective of his still camera throughout: nothing but static frames with people staring into the lens, and it gains a weird energy as a result as it goes along), creating touristy snapshots of these people in towns, at religious sites, standing atop the Great Wall of China, and at Hong Kong Disneyland.
The latter two examples specifically foreshadow the film’s ideas about the forcible homogenization of the Tibetan people into whatever the Chinese government says they have to be, but the bulk of that work is done by the modestly ominous suggestions of the final shot, which lands with a thud in the silent space left by the chatting and laughter of the rest of the film. For it is awfully funny, looking with its unforced observational candor at people being uncontainable messes no matter how badly the photographer tries to choreograph them. In truth, the whole thing is a bit concepty and editorially heavy-handed in the last moments, but the implicit humanism of the whole thing is so affecting that I can’t really complain. 8/10
Parvaneh (Talkhon Hamzavi and Stefan Eichenberger, Switzerland)
I have a suspicion that I should find this to be corny bullshit, and yet somehow, it really works. Teenager Parvaneh (Nissa Kashani) is an Afghan refugee living in Switzerland, and she needs to send some money back home. The trip to Zurich to find a place to wire the money is daunting, but it’s the easy part – Parvaneh’s papers and age mean that she can do no such thing, which means she must hunt around for a kind stranger. The only one she finds is a slightly older punk, Emely (Cheryl Graf), who agrees to help for a small fee, but the store is closed by the time the girls get back there. On the spot, Emely proposes that Parvaneh should pal around with her and they can go back in the morning. In the meantime, it’s a night of music, clubs, flirting with boys, and finding out that the two have a lot in common.
Clichés don’t come any mustier, but the Euro-realist style and incredibly laid-back naturalistic acting on display help enormously to make Parvaneh seem more insightful and raw than it sounds. There’s no sweetie-pie fun going on; the whole time, Parvaneh seems slightly dazed and alarmed at the speed and danger of life in the urban West, compared to her safe, rural enclave of fellow refugees, and though the connection she makes with Emely is clearly important and unprecedented, the film doesn’t pretend to have solved The Immigrant Problem. Bless it for that.
Anyway, the acting is sharp, Kashani especially, and while the style is a bit Dardennes-light, director Hamzavi wields it with canny discipline for when it can heighten the narrative vs. when it can serve to accentuate the moments in between narrative. I would never want to see this as a feature, but it’s a pretty thoughtful 25 minutes. 8/10
The Phone Call (Mat Kirkby and James Lucas, UK)
The other frontrunner, and I rather think the best of the five (though Parvaneh comes close). It’s a sterling example of something that could never work so well except as a snug, 20-minute short: set up a single situation, play it out, get the hell out of there. Heather (Sally Hawkins) works at a virtually empty crisis call center, and she picks up early one shift to hear a very sad man identifying himself as Stan (Jim Broadbent, never seen). At first trying simply to cheer Stan up, Heather teases out after a few minutes that he’s just taken a lethal dose of pills, having wanted to kill himself ever since his wife died. And he’s not calling for help, but simply to have company while he drifts off into death.
It’s an acting showcase: director Kikby rather sensibly understands that a film which consists of almost nothing other than a phone conversation in which we never see one of the two participants needs to have an immovable rock on the visible end of the line. The Phone Call would wither and die without having somebody that Kirkby could point his camera at for minutes, confident that whatever is happening on her face is bound to be interesting, and Hawkins is that somebody. She has to build a character using hardly any backstory, and then communicate a desire to be sympathetic, a steely determination to save Stan from himself, and flustered panic that she is by no means equipped to deal with this situation, and she does all of this so well that it doesn’t even register as acting; the film gets to skip right ahead to the part where it asks us to consider what it would be like to be Heather, tossed into this horrible situation; but also to be Stan, that sad and empty. It’s a lovely portrait of mental states in turmoil, concise and streamlined and driven enough that the lack of flash doesn’t register till it’s all over. 8/10