Presenting brief reviews of the five films nominated for this year’s Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film, ranked from my favorite to least-favorite.
Ala Kachuu – Take and Run (Maria Brendle, Switzerland)
There exists in Kyrgyzstan a practice called ala kachuu, which a ritualised, traditional form of kidnapping, with a set of codes and forms and a long history behind it and all. Herein, an unmarried young woman is snatched away by an unmarried man and trapped in a room, where the man’s female relatives try to coerce her into accepting his proposal of marriage. Which, in context, is a kind of ludicrously genteel way of putting it. This is technically illegal, and generally not prosecuted, as is true of so many things that are only technically illegal.
So, obviously, the short Ala Kachuu – Take and Run is about this practice, and given that it was made by a Swiss filmmaker, it’s not terribly surprising that it’s about this practice. That is to say, the film’s entire “thing” is to just tell its audience that ala kachuu exists; having defined it for you in the opening paragraph, I have also told you pretty much the entire plot of the 38-minute film, except for the question of whether Sezim (Alina Turdumamatova) manages to escape from this plight, or if the unimaginable pressures of Custom and Tradition cause her to give in.
A pretty straightforward message movie, in other words, and I am absolutely no fan at all of message movies. But Ala Kachuu is the kind of thing that gives lecturing harangues a great name. For something so capital-I important that it received an Oscar nomination, this is compulsively watchable: writer-director Maria Brendle has packaged this social studies lesson inside a fiercely tense thriller built around the constant state of confused panic Sezim feels from the moment she’s grabbed by a cadre of strange men. Cinematographer Gabriel Sandru employs a handheld camera throughout the whole thing, and I’m not sure if I can name another movie from the last year that felt like it used that stylistic technique to such jagged, raw, perfect effect: the whole film seems to be coursing with electricity. The main thrust of the film is not the violence or the injustice of the whole affair, but the sheer incoherence of it: it’s practically Kafkaesque in how Sezim suddenly finds herself in a situation she has no control over, for reasons she can’t figure out, being hectored by grim old women exuding an ice-cold faux-kindness (probably the cruelest edge to the movie is Sezim’s prospective mother-in-law offering a more-in-sadness-than-anger lecture about giving in; the film is arguing, to rather sickening effect, that if men are the perpetrators of ala kachuu, women are in some respect the enforcers).
Of course “Kafkaesque” implies some degree of dreamy absurdity, and the whole point of the film is that this is drearily, horribly real. And so we go back to the handheld, which grounds this in daily life, as do the plain domestic spaces where the action takes place. The horrors of the scenario are all the more visceral for how normal so much of this seems, and how little overt stylisation goes into it. And it’s all built around a terrific central character: Sezim is sketched out quickly and efficiently, giving us a great sense of her personality and the fortitude she has to draw from while she attempts to deal with her ongoing nightmare. Gripping all around, enough to make that 38-minute running time (a simply murderous length for a “short”, in my opinion) feel like barely anything at all.
Please Hold (K.D. Dávila, USA)
From the sort-of Kafkaesque to the actually Kafkaesque. So, picture this: it’s the near-future. On his way to his low-paying service industry job, Mateo (Erick Lopez) is intercepted by an automated police drone, which informs him in a scary tone of voice that he’s under arrest. Mateo is swept away to a beige concrete room with a bed, a toilet, and a computer screen, and offered a plea bargain: 5-7 years instead of the 50-ish years he’ll get if he’s found guilty. Guilty of what? The automated computer assistant (voiced by Dani Messerschmidt) that is his solely connection to the rest of humanity keeps brushing by that question with the cheerful emptiness of every automatic phone system that gets you shouting “Operator! Operator! Operator!” within about 90 seconds of placing your call. And to make things worse, Mateo can’t call the outside world to let his family, or a lawyer, or literally anyone know what’s going on, since it costs $3 per minute to use the phone system, and he accidentlaly emptied his bank account waiting on hold with the police.
We are so blatantly in the realm of the sci-fi parable for Life Today that it almost burns, and Please Hold makes things a little bit harder on itself than it needs to, on top of it: it is trying, simultaneously and for its entire 19-minute running time, to be about both the monstrousness of a for-profit prison system that uses sloppy, biased police work to scoop people into a situation where the only option they have for navigating the impenetrable workings oáf the U.S. judicial system is to take plea bargains rather than go a trial they can’t afford, even if they could easily win; and it’s also about how we’re growing much too comfortable letting automatic systems, A.I., and facial recognition technology do basically everything for us, and it will potentially become very horrible if we don’t find a way to stop.
That’s a lot to bite off in a short running time, and it makes the film feel overstuffed, and unable to fully explore any of its big thematic ideas. It also hurts that the two things aren’t equal: too much A.I. and automation may or may not become problems in the future, while unjust indictments and for-profit prison are problems right now. This isn’t so much a sci-fi metaphor for the problems of our world, as a sci-fi metaphor that actually seems to diminish the exact problem that the filmmakers are trying to solve for, and, well, that’s just not right.
What saves it all is the film’s impeccable command of tone. This is screenwriter K.D. Dávila’s first time as a director, and she manages to control a precise balance that easily could have felled a much more seasoned pro. In short, Please Hold is both an absurd comedy, and something essentially like a horror story about being trapped with no resources and functionally no way to communicate at all in a bureaucratic hell where your life is at stake. It often tries to be both of this things simultaneously, with one single beat making us laugh and shudder. That’s a shockingly big achievement for a first-timer, and combined with Lopez’s comfortably straightforward everyman performance, it makes Please Hold so involving and watchable that its limitations as a work of satire and social commentary end up feeling somewhat academic.
The Dress (Tadeusz Łysiak, Poland)
Short films being too often regarded even by their makers as a calling card, granting one access to the world of making “real films”, it’s no surprise when they turn out to be student projects made by first-timers. And so it is with The Dress, Tadeusz Łysiak’s thesis film. The reason I bring it up is that the overriding problem with The Dress is one that comes straight out of the fact that the man who wrote and directed it is still mostly untested by the world, and is perhaps stuck in “I know this works, because I saw it work in other movies” more than he should be.
Simply put, if I were to say to you, “what do Eastern European art films do?” you would probably come back with something like “they depress the hell out of you by presenting the world as a place of infinite suffering”, and you would have exactly described The Dress. It is knee-jerk miserabilism, a clichéd vision of Polish cinema. This isn’t to say it’s poorly made or unworthy of watching, because it is neither. But it certainly feels like what you make when you’ve absorbed the idea that Real Movies are sad, and so you pursue sadness without doing much with that sadness. As in: well, what is the meaning of this story of suffering? And the answer is returned, It’s profound because it’s unpleasant, what do you mean, “meaning”?
The story is about a hotel maid named Julka (Anna Dzieduszycka), a thirtysomething woman with dwarfism. Her physical condition has made it difficult for her to form human connections, especially romantic ones; it appears that her only friend is co-worker Renata (Dorota Pomykala), and what we see makes it appear to be a friendship more of convenience than deep connection. This all maybe changes when Julka meets Bogdan (Szymon Piotr Warszawski), a cute-enough guy who asks her out. But by the time that happens, we’re deep enough into the film’s glum world that there seems to be very little reason to assume this will go well.
The Dress is a polished piece of filmmaking – unimaginative, but proficient in its crisply dark lighting and careful staging. Its very obvious main weapon is Dzieduszycka, whose performance is somewhat constrained by the boundaries of Łysiak’s script: she’s full of self-doubt and self-loathing, she doesn’t talk, her free time is spent in mechanical “fun” at a local pub. But within those constraints, she’s finding everything that can be pulled out to make this somewhat generic victim of universal cruelty a particular human being who has lived a specific life. There’s a fullness to her reactions, a sense of internal chaos as hope and fear war within her, that make her feel like more than just a suffering innocent. And that’s enough to carry The Dress through its 30-minute running time; one of the benefits of short-form storytelling is that one extremely strong element can sustain our interest to get through the whisper of a plot, in a way it couldn’t at two hours. And that certainly happens here; I didn’t feel those 30 minutes. Still, an Oscar nomination feels inordinately generous.
The Long Goodbye (Aneil Karia, UK)
The nominees for Best Animated Short Film were longer than usual this year, which makes this 12-minute sketch of a South Asian immigrant family coming under attack from fascists the shortest nominee for any award at the 94th Academy Awards. So that’s one fun fact. Another is that this was designed as a piece of streaming content, moreso than a standalone short film; it’s something of an extended music video in support of star Riz Ahmed’s album of the same title, released in March 2020. This explains what would otherwise be the most baffling part of the film, which is that once the story has ended, there’s suddenly a nondiegetic rap song playing over the action, without really doing anything to interact with the images. Once the song is over, the protagonist – who has been murdered in the streets, at this point, finishes up by delivering a spoken-word rap in a single take, as the camera pivots back and forth around him in a half-circle.
I say none of this to criticise The Long Goodbye, but merely to explain why it exists in the form it does, which otherwise makes damn little sense. And okay, to criticise a bit. The film cleanly breaks into thirds: it opens with the family enjoying a little slice-of-life drama in best “kitchen sink” British art film tradition, unprepared for the horrifying rupture of armed thugs bursting into their homes and tossing them into the street. It’s captured without much imagination by director Aneil Karia and cinematographer Stuart Bentley, but “are we being imaginative?” was obviously not a concern here. It’s a brisk, blunt, ugly portrayal of an ugly possible future, and dressing that up was clearly not the goal. Capturing it with immediacy and extreme aesthetic naturalism was. So that’s all pretty good stuff. The final part, with that long-take rap, and Ahmed sometimes looking straight into the lens as he delivers it, is a bit mannered, but it has urgency and intimacy.
The music video in between those two parts is, I think, not very good; it seems driven more by the logic of “we’re promoting an album” than because Karia had ideas about how to use music and image together to create a new meaning. If anything, adding the music deflates the meaning: visually, it’s still in the handheld, ragged realism mode of the first part, but the song shifts the wobbly camera and violent editing into feeling like, I hate to say it, but feeling cool, like we’re suddenly watching a thriller and not a social issues drama. The whole thing is less than the sum of its parts, that is to say. And armed with the knowledge that this was designed for social media, it’s hard not to see how it would fit there – and I do not say this because I am a steady believer in the capacity of social media to host intellectually productive arguments.
On My Mind (Martin Strange-Hansen, Denmark)
In any year, there are enough new short films made that it shouldn’t be impossible to find five good ones, but the Oscar nominees routinely end up including at least one film, in one of the three short film categories, where it is just not possible for me to understand what they were seeing. Here is 2021’s example of the form. One morning, a disheveled man, Henrik (Rasmus Hammerich) wanders into a bar with a karaoke machine, insisting on singing “Always On My Mind” for his wife. The bartender, Louise (Camilla Bendix), agrees to record him; Preben (Ole Gorter Boisen), another man in the bar (its owner, I think; this one started to lose my attention at top speed), finds this extremely distracting and is a huge dick about the whole thing. Eventually, we learn why Henrik is in such an all-fired hurry, and tears are jerked.
There’s just no “here” here. It’s gloppily sentimental, which I’m sure was what made the Academy get all excited, but lots of short films are sentimental and have plots that are driven by conflict. On My Mind is driven by Henrik not saying the first thing that any actual human being would say in his situation, upon arriving in the bar, solely so there can be some question as to whether he’ll finish singing a three-minute song. Which is just not at all a high-stakes question, especially since the film refuses to give his motivation until the last scene, long after it would do us any good.
Even without dinging it for a completely empty experience as a narrative, though, this is just so drably made. Drably, and badly: there’s at least one camera reframing, right in the middle of a take that got used in the final cut. And the very best that the one can claim for the film is that the action has all been staged in front of the camera and lit for exposure, but certainly not that the actors have been arranged in the frame with any sort of interesting way of teasing out their inner lives, or even making it entirely clear where they’re standing. Just complete amorphous junk, all around.