Oscar Shorts in Theatres Now: Each Program Has at Least One Gem
By Chris Knight
Rating: A-
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gives out awards each year for best short film in three categories: animation, live-action, and documentary. They are quite literally the long and the short of it.
Academy rules stipulate that a short is anything up to 40 minutes, and a feature is anything 40 and over. (Fun fact: In France, a feature is defined as more than 58 minutes and 29 seconds, the duration of 1,600 meters of 35 mm film. Ah, the French!)
Julia Aks as Estrogenia Talbot in the Oscar-nominated spoof Jane Austen’s Period Piece.
But put together all five nominees and you’re well into feature-length territory, no matter how you define it. The animated shorts program this year is 82 minutes long (not far off from many animated features), while the live-action collection runs just under two hours. And the docs rival the longest best-picture nominees at two hours and 37 minutes.
Are they worth viewing? On the whole, yes.
And they are getting their screen time ahead of time at theatres across North America.
Let’s start with the most uneven bunch, the five live-action shorts. Two of them — A Friend of Dorothy, starring Stephen Fry and the wonderful Miriam Margolyes, and Butcher’s Stain, about a Palestinian working in an Israeli supermarket — are perfectly adequate and lovely but not in the “Oscar calibre” realm.
They are balanced out by some wildly creative storytelling. Two People Exchanging Saliva takes place in an alternate reality (and in black and white!) where kissing is a capital offence, and goods are purchased with slaps to the face. Imagine all that mixed with the movie Carol.
Then there’s The Singers, an adaptation of a 19th-century short story by Ivan Turgenev, in which a bunch of rough-looking men in a dingy bar have an impromptu sing-off, with surprising results.
Finally, Jane Austen’s Period Drama, which I shall spoil ever so slightly by suggesting you put the emphasis on the third word in that title when reading it. Also watch for Emma Thompson’s surely first-of-a-kind end credit.
The live-action shorts end with that joyous comedy. Why couldn’t the documentary shorts do likewise?
Four of the five are stirring and excellent but also depressing, as we spend a day at an Atlanta abortion clinic (The Devil Is Busy); follow two journalists as they document the abandoned bedrooms of children killed in school shootings (All the Empty Rooms); witness the life and death of photojournalist Brent Renaud (Armed Only with a Camera); and watch a group of Israelis protest the murder of Palestinian children by their country’s attack on Gaza (Children No More).
Ah, but then there’s Perfectly a Strangeness, by Canada’s Alison McAlpine, leading off the quintet and making another wonderful addition to the “donkumentary” category, a genre that includes Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthasar, its spiritual successor EO, the road movie Donkeyote, and the Willem Dafoe-narrated Do Donkeys Act?
Perfectly a Strangeness glides wordlessly over a mere 15 minutes, as a trio of donkeys — listed in the credits as Palomo, Ruperto, and Palaye — clip-clop through the thin, chilly air of Chile’s high Atacama desert.
They pass a cluster of high-tech observatories, seemingly devoid of human life but nevertheless unfurling at sundown to sample starlight, like vampiric violets. The landscape looks neo-post-apocalyptic; abandoned, but not in ruins.
McAlpine made a feature-length film about astronomers in the same region (2018’s Cielo), but has truly outdone herself with this equine followup.
Mention of donkeys may remind you of Shrek, which is as good a segue as any into the animated category. They include The Girl Who Cried Pearls, a Canadian production that is technically a wonder but narratively a little flat; Butterfly, based on the life of French swimmer Alfred Nakache; and Forevergreen, which asks: “What if The Giving Tree met a bear?”
Best of the bunch are the first and the last. The series leads off with The Three Sisters, a funny, dialogue-free story in which the arrival of a single man on an island populated by a trio of women causes a great upheaval.
And it closes with Retirement Plan, featuring the voice of Domhnall Gleeson as a middle-aged man who imagines all the things he’ll do with all the free time he’s going to have.
“I will get good at saying yes,” he says in one of the film’s more thoughtful moments. “I will get better at saying no.”
He’ll also get a dog. Or maybe a cat. Or a fish. A terrapin? At the very least he’ll learn what a terrapin is. May we all retire so hopefully.
Oscar shorts. Directed by various. Starring various. In theatres February 20, including Toronto’s TiFF Lightbox, the Fox, Revue and Paradise theatres.