movies
The Short
Sharp Shock
A LOOK AT THIS YEAR’S
OSCAR-NOMINATED
LIVE-ACTION SHORT FILMS
By Rick Levin
T
he short story is a wonderful art form.
There are storywriters — Alice Munro,
Anton Chekov, Denis Johnson, James
Joyce, to name a few heavies — who
can accomplish more in a few pages
than most writers achieve in their
baggy and cumbersome novels. A
good short story is like a cosmic slap in the face.
Same with short films, I’ve discovered. This year’s
Oscar nominees, for instance, represent a strong and
diverse sampling of what can be achieved in a single reel,
as it were. Give a talented director and writer 10 or 20
minutes, and they might just break your heart or help
you rediscover your joy.
Turns out it takes far less time to create (or re-create)
the universe than was previously suspected.
Here, then, are this year’s Academy Award-nominated
live-action short films.
Detainment
Based on actual interviews and court transcripts,
Detainment tells the relentlessly unnerving story of a
pair of 10-year-old boys who, inexplicably, murdered
a toddler they abducted from a shopping center in
Liverpool in 1993. The film, written and directed by
Vincent Lambe, is as repulsive as it is riveting — a
precipitous tumble into the abyss of human evil. Short on
answers and devoid of all but implied violence, the film is
nonetheless rife with implications about the sociopathy
of children, the gravitational pull of peer pressure and the
incomprehension we experience in the face of motiveless
murder. Most disturbing is the suggested intertwining of
innocence and brutality, as well as the broader tragedy of
the modern world, where children — through a paradoxical
twist of legal logic — are tried as adults. It all spools out like
Hitchcock’s Rope, but with adolescents. You’ll want to look
away — but you won’t, because you can’t. It’s a terrifying
film that left me hyperventilating with anxiety.
Fauve
Another breathlessly suspenseful and tragic story
about two adolescent boys being boys, Fauve opens on a
touching scene of childhood innocence: A pair of kids play-
SKIN
ing a game of “chicken” in an abandoned train in the rural
countryside of Québec. As each one tries to out-scare the
other, we’re treated to a vision of youthful power dynamics,
which amounts to the question: “Can I make you flinch?”
As the competition progresses, the two boys wander into
an open pit mine, where they stumble upon a quagmire
that holds far more than they bargained for. Written and
directed by Jérémy Comte, Fauve begins in larkishness
and ends in the ultimate loss of innocence — a short, sym-
bol-rich journey that, despite its brevity, traverses a literal
lifetime of emotional geography. It’s a beautiful and quietly
devastating film.
Marguerite
Life, death, aging, human communion and forbidden
love, all contained in a film that runs less than 20 minutes:
That is the emotional wallop of Marguerite, a simple yet
profound story about the relationship between a young
elder-care nurse and her dying client. An overheard bit
of phone conversation leads housebound Marguerite
(Béatrice Picard) to the discovery that her caretaker,
Rachel (Sandrine Bisson), is a lesbian, which awakens
in Marguerite a long-ago — and long-repressed and
unconsummated — flame she herself had for a woman
in her younger days. “What’s it like to make love to a
woman?” she asks Rachel. What transpires between
the nurse and her client is beautiful and oddly moving,
as regret and compassion create a bond between two
human beings whose experiences were defined and
constrained by the times in which they lived. Writer/
director Marianne Farley’s touch is gentle and sweet.
No political statements are made, and no axes ground to
dogma; rather, this is a timeless tale of understanding,
connection and grace. It ripped my heart out.
Madre
Holy hell. Apparently, children in jeopardy is the
implicit partial theme of this year’s Oscar shorts, and
Madre — among some already stiff competition — might
be the direst and most chilling of the lot. Director
Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s nasty blast of a film plays like
Polanski-meets-Hitchcock shot out of a choke-bore
cannon cast from pure maternal anxiety. The film
opens, deceptively, on a languorous panning shot of
some desolate coastline in France, and lurking in the
natural beauty we already sense a terrible threat. The
film quickly transitions to a Spanish apartment, where a
mother and daughter are bantering back and forth. The
phone rings. It’s the young mom’s 6-year-old son, whom
we hear only over the line. Dad’s disappeared, he says.
And the kid doesn’t know where he is — France or Spain,
somewhere. The beach is empty until “a man” appears.
The batteries on the phone start to die. It’s not good, not
at all. In fact, it’s a nightmare. Watch at your own risk.
Skin
Director Guy Nattiv’s Skin is at once the most
powerful and, ironically, the weakest of this year’s
nominated shorts — a tale of extreme karmic retribution
that utilizes a Twilight Zone reversal to make an
obvious point that, in the end, adds little (perhaps less
than little) to the dialogue about our current state of
race relations. Jonathan Tucker is appropriately vile
as Johnny, the white supremacist who stokes a gang
reprisal when he mercilessly beats a black man (Ashley
Thomas) for merely smiling at his son at a grocery store.
Trapped at the center of this endless rivalry are the
children, of course, but Nattiv’s narrative is too heavy
handed and didactic to build empathy in any direction,
and all we see are characters who become pawns in a
field of ideological warfare. A feature-length film is due
this year, though it’s hard to see that adding anything to
the rather rote ideas that drive this story. ■
MARGUERITE
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F E B R U A R Y
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The 2019 Oscar-nominated live-action and animated short films are now
showing at Bijou Art Cinemas; info and times at bijou-cinemas.com.
E U G E N E W E E K LY . C O M