SELECTED SHORTS VI - CRITERION CHANNEL

With Filmstruck shutting down, I thought I’d squeeze in one last shorts column. If there is a way to resurrect it at a later date, naturally, I will, but without the Criterion Channel, the label doesn’t really have any other venue to showcase random short films--I guess unless I just watch ones that are bonus features on their discs, reviewing them separately from the main feature. I’m sad to see Filmstruck go. It was fun while it lasted. While I imagine that the Criterion Channel will get resurrected again, hopefully with the same level of curation, I doubt we will get another one-two punch of also having the added bonus of the Turner Classics library.

You can read the previous columns here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

My Josephine (2003; USA; 7 minutes): Moonlight-director Barry Jenkins creates a collage-like narrative about two Arab immigrants running a laundromat. The man is in love with the woman, whom he compares to Napoleon’s first wife, and he ponders the nature of devotion, longing, and assimilation. It all works on a symbolic level, expressing their joint--and disjointed--experience through suggestion and metaphor, and yet is also effective as simple drama.

Bath House (2014; Sweden 15 minutes): I’ve reviewed a couple of films by Niki Lindroth von Bahr in previous installments, but this is by far the one with the most coherent plot. Featuring the director’s usual stop-motion style, it portrays a public pool where several animal characters intersect: the horse who is working at the bath house, a gay feline couple who go their to swim, and a trio of bunnies looking to rob the place. Things go wrong for each outing, leaving all six critters stranded on the street, unable to swim, as the pool itself starts to disintegrate.

Less surreal and abstract than Tord and Tord or The Burden, Bath House manages a quiet humanity, finding intrigue in everyday life, suggesting individual conflict through tiny actions. It’s also charming to look at.

Incident By A Bank (2010; Sweden; 13 minutes): This short by Ruben Olstund, the director of Force Majeure and The Square, is an impressive piece of film choreography. Shot in one continuous take, it captures two inept bank robbers trying to pull a heist, but from the vantage of a non-participatory observer. Remaining outside the bank, the camera probes the street, looking for action and reaction, as bystanders comment on the events, jump into the fray, or even move through the scene oblivious to what is really going on. It’s all rather fascinating both in execution and in drama, putting us in the position to judge the voyeurs who do nothing--while literally doing nothing ourselves.

The Horse in Focus (1956; Sweden; 17 minutes): Staying in Sweden to dip into the Criterion 100 Years of Olympic Films collection, this colorful documentary is both quaint and erudite, kind of exactly the sort of thing you imagined a couple of years back when Mitt Romney was made fun of for participating in “dressage.”

The star here is the commentator rather than the performers, with his clear bias for his home country and flashes of dry wit, tossing zingers at riders when they make errors. There is little suspense in the proceedings, particularly as much is left on the cutting room floor and often the commentary jumps ahead to tell us what happens next. But what makes The Horse in Focus interesting is how it approaches the athletes, with neither the horse nor the rider really given any prime attention. Rather, they are a unit, rising and falling, quite literally, together.

An Act of Love (2018; Australia; 11 minutes): Writer/director Lucy Knox packs a lot into a very short time. A pair of identical twin black girls has their afternoon out at the mall swerve from light-hearted fun to a deep interpersonal drama, testing their sibling bond. When a capricious older boy decides to separate them by turning his flirtatious attention on one sister, leaving the other behind, it stirs up a variety of conflicting emotions in both girls, ultimately requiring a drastic measure of solidarity to repair the damage. In all of this lingers questions of identity and an outcry against the extensive damage of casual racism and misogyny. Knox’s narrative is minimal, but her meaning complex.

Night Mayor (2009; Canada; 14 minutes): The auteur Guy Maddin is up to his usual visual tricks in this black-and-white film evoking 1930s sci-fi and horror. A Croatian immigrant sets out to convert the aurora borealis into music, but his efforts succeed far beyond his imagination, going beyond simple melody and instead broadcasting evocative images across Canada’s phone lines. Though he believes he has tapped into something that shows his fellow Canadians glimpses of themselves and their own national character, there is an underlying menace to his invention, particularly in how he exploits his family.

Night Mayor is an evocative mood piece, with Jason Staczek’s avant-garde music doing a lot of heavy lifting to make the titular pun a cinematic reality. (Say it out loud a couple of times, you’ll get it.)

Home (2016; England; 20 minutes): Is there more going on here than I am seeing? From what I can surmise, Daniel Mulloy is executing a simple reversal technique, showing us the struggle of European refugees by making the focus a middle-class British family trying to get through a war zone. Or is it that they are getting into one, rather than escaping to safety? No matter, the approach is so straightforward, Home is wholly ineffective. It only succeeds in shining a light on the actuality of white privilege: if you need to recognize the skin and accent as similar to your own in order to empathize with such tragic situations, then you’re as shallow as this film.

Swallowed (2016; USA; 17 minutes): Lily Baldwin pulls triple duty here as writer, director, and star, creating for herself a trippy yet ultimately baffling horror film. Centering on a young mother who begins to have bizarre hallucinations while breastfeeding her child, this short quickly descends into a lot of surreal nonsense, a couple of special effects away from being body horror, but never quite settling into any clear realm of meaning. My guess was that this had something to do with food anxieties, particularly that of women, who are expected to not just give of their bodies, but in more traditional (read: outdated) scenarios, to also cook for everyone. In that, Swallowed finds little victory. Baldwin’s perception of reactions others have to her food--dancing, writhing, convulsing--look like parodies of cliché acting exercises. “Pick an animal and pretend to be that animal vomiting.” Swallowed is like someone saw the last reels of Darren Aronofsky’s mother! and failed to realize he spent a good 45 minutes setting everything up.

Reading the official description of the film, though, it appears that Swallowed is not about any of that, but more about the feelings its main character tamps down, Marge Simpson-style, in order to maintain a brave face. More telling than even that, however, is the fact that the screenplay was based on someone’s dream, proving once again that dreams are boring when they aren’t (a) either contrived to fit into some narrative and thus don’t reflect real dreams at all (see 99% of all movies with dream sequences) or (b) lacking the personal interest that allows one to either be fascinated by what they don’t understand or somehow decode it. Thinking about it, though, the only thing that might be worse than watching Swallowed would be listening to the dreamer/director try to explain it. Whatever the code, continue to keep it to yourself.

SELECTED SHORTS III - CRITERION CHANNEL

The Criterion Channel, in addition to hosting a plethora of feature films, also has a varied collection of short films--live action, animated, fiction, documentary; comedy and drama; silent and talkies.

Short cinema--just like short stories--is a unique art form unto itself, employing different conventions, and bringing with it different expectations, but these pieces are no less worthy of consideration than full-length films. From time to time, I will take a look at a selection of what’s on offer. You can read the previous columns here and here.

Neighbours (1952; Canada; 8 minutes): Two men with adjoining homes find their friendship disrupted by a flower growing on their property line. They argue, build fences, and try to take possession of the plant until the whole thing overwhelms them. Told without dialogue, and shot using stop-motion techniques, Neighbours is a whimsical, surreal parable. Director Norman McLaren was a wizard with the camera, and he says more about human greed and the futility of war in this abstract handful of minutes than many say with a full script and an extended running time.

Casus Belli (2010; Greece; 11 minutes): A clever construct. Director Yorgos Zois strings people together queue by queue, showing groups standing in line for groceries, a nightclub, confession, off-track betting, an art museum, and an ATM. We scroll past each gathering, and the first person in the line steps out of it and moves over to the next. Unfortunately, when Zois gets to his point, the turn is rather heavy handed, ending at a bread line and featuring an actor giving a disdainful look to the camera when the charity comes up short. I get the idea is to switch from the frivolous to the serious, but it’s a pretty obvious move and Casus Belli is less effective for it.

Skunk (2014; USA; 17 minutes): Writer and director Annie Silverstein creates an uncomfortable, but strangely comforting short tale of adolescence. When a Texas teen (Jenivieve Nugent) takes her dog down to the river to give him a bath after he ended up on the wrong end of a skunk, she meets an opportunistic boy (Sam Stinson) who toys with her emotions, promising her all kinds of things if she’ll hook up with him and let him use her pooch in a dogfight.

Stories like this come with a built-in tension, as we have seem the likes of this boy before, and we know his brand of interference rarely bodes well. One watches Skunk with a knot of worry. Just how bad will this go for Leila? Silverstein approaches the events with an unwavering honesty, she is not exploitative. While Criterion has smartly paired this with Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank [review], I’m perhaps reminded more of David Gordon Green’s George Washington [review]. What all three directors have in common is an empathy for their characters; their storytelling is observational, they never look down their noses at their protagonists, but rather try to put themselves into the situation to see where they come from.

The Acquaintances of a Lonely John (2008; USA; 12 minutes): A solo outing from Benny Safdie (one half of the team behind Good Time), this short follows one guy on his daily meanderings. Aimless by design, one I suppose should be prepared to forgive a lot, but only a few of the scenarios are charming. Likely Safdie--who also plays the titular John--is making best use of what he had available; the film mostly loses its way when it settles down at a gas station for some Clerks style antics. Ironically, The Acquaintances of a Lonely John is actually best when Safdie is alone and simply amusing himself.

John’s Gone (2010; USA; 22 minutes): Josh and Ben Safdie directing together, with Ben starring as John--perhaps the same John from Benny’s earlier effort, hard to say. The tone is similar to The Acquaintances of a Lonely John: a touch of comedy, a loose plot, episodic. Here John is hustling various goods out of his apartment, selling second-hand junk and pulling internet scams. The film itself puts focus on the strange customers, and John’s interactions with other people in his apartment building. He’s a guy who seems to try to have a hand in everything, and sometimes it gets him in trouble. Many narrative opportunities are missed here. The Safdies could go in deep on any number of the relationships, or even hold John’s feet to the fire when a one-night stand he was rude to comes back, but John’s Gone always stays on the superficial. Ultimately, there is no ending here, no conclusion to be drawn, the movie just fades out.

The Black Case (2014; Canada; 13 minutes): A mysterious, surreal drama with elements of horror, The Black Case causes the audience to question the nature of identity, voyeurism, and in a way, one’s own physicality. Set in a strange hospital scenario, we see two children locked away and the doctor and nurse that are meant to care for them. Just about everything isn’t what it seems, and though co-directors Caroline Monnet and Daniel Watchorn eschew all exposition--and hell, dialogue for the most part--they don’t obfuscate for the mere sake of it. Like Eraserhead but with one foot still in reality.

L’opera-mouffe (1958; France; 16 minutes): Also known as Diary of a Pregnant Woman, this black-and-white short from Agnès Varda, who was indeed pregnant at the time of the making and serves as her own model at the start of the picture, is more of a collage of the life cycle of a small French village than it is a look at the cycle of pregnancy. Set to a score by the great Georges Delerue (Jules et Jim), Varda details many aspects of existence, from sex and food to drunkenness and anxiety. The bits that do touch on the birth process tend to be more abstracted, including the surreal growth and eventual hatching of a chicken from a glass bowl. The result is whimsical and strange, but also kind of sobering. Also, a greater collection of real faces you aren’t likely to find in any cinematic era.

(This film is also available on the DVD of Cléo from 5 to 7.)

The Burden (2017; Sweden; 14 minutes): Another surreal musical, this time by director Niki Lindroth von Bahr, whose Tord and Tord I covered back in the first installment of this column.
Created via stop-motion animation, The Burden features fish in a motel, mice working in fast food, telemarketing monkeys, and a lone canine shopping in a mega-mart. In each scenario, the lonely animals are searching for some kind of connection and eventual release in an increasingly convenient world (or should that be “convenient” in quotes?).

Charming, unpredictable, and surprisingly joyous.

SELECTED SHORTS - CRITERION CHANNEL

The Criterion Channel, in addition to hosting a plethora of feature films, also has a varied collection of short films--live action, animated, fiction, documentary; comedy and drama; silent and talkies.

I’ve covered a couple of them in the past--namely Kitty and Dawn, films directed by the actresses Chloë Sevigny and Rose McGowan--and going forward will check in from time to time to sample their library. Short cinema--just like short stories--is a unique art form unto itself, employing different conventions, and bringing with it different expectations, but these pieces are no less worthy of consideration than full-length films.

Art (2014; Romania; 19 minutes): A philosophical meditation on the moral quandaries of film representation, Adrian Sitaru’s Art centers around an audition for what is purportedly a movie that would depict the dangers faced by victims of human trafficking. Two filmmakers are looking for a teenage girl to play a prostitute, specifically a scene pantomiming fellatio for the camera, and after they decide one young actress has the qualities they are seeking, they try to convince her mother to let her star in the film.

What follows is a back-and-forth about the meaning of exploitation and abuse, and whether or not money and intent equals art. Some of the directors’ rhetoric strays toward the uncomfortable, and one can only question who has the girl’s true interest at heart, if anyone, and whether or not she is even capable of deciding for herself. Sitaru is self-reflexive without being cute about it, and without crossing his own line into exploiting the girl by making the actual actress do any of what is being debated for real. What makes it interesting is the denouement, following the departure of the women, when the filmmakers turn on each other, and we begin to question what even their own personal motivations are.

Unfortunately, Sitaru doesn’t end Art where he should, tagging on an ambiguous, esoteric finale that is either some kind of justification for his own ambitions or a bad joke about the pretentions of his colleagues. Or perhaps he just watched the most recent Twin Peaks. It’s a trick that distracts from the larger point rather than enhancing its meaning.

Love You More (2008; England; 15 minutes): A slice of teenage life, with a boy and a girl coming together to listen to the only copy of the Buzzcocks’ single “Love You More” for sale in the local shop. Starring Harry Treadaway (Penny Dreadful) and Andrea Riseborough (Birdman [review]), Love You More does much with very little. This is all about the quick coupling that develops from a shared interest, when love comes at 45rpm and sex lasts the 1 minute and 51 seconds between the first groove to the last. Director Sam Taylor-Johnson would eventually abandon the restraint employed here to direct Fifty Shades of Grey, but that’s the way of punk rock isn’t it? The naïve rush eventually gives way to the cynical cash grab, and the first time is impossible to recapture.

Also worth noting: Love You More was written by Patrick Marber, who wrote Closer and Notes on a Scandal.

Ártún (2014; Iceland; 20 minutes): Like Love You More, this Icelandic coming-of-age story is set to a punk rock soundtrack. Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s mini movie follows three boys from their small town to the city to meet up with some girls and bribe them with cigarettes for kisses. Young Arnar (Flóki Haraldsson) is eager to grow up and be with a girl, but he’s still a little bit behind his friends. Thus, for him, this venture is all bravado, which soon turns to anxiousness as things look to potentially go better than expected.

Guðmundsson (Heartstone) quickly establishes his world, capturing the isolation of the rural community with a few well-chosen details. The boys don’t come from much, and they suffer abuse. Thus it quickly becomes obvious that Arnar’s sexual longing is really born of a need for general affection, a fact that Guðmundsson manages to convey with a disarming tenderness, even as he undercuts it with basic human cruelty.

Tord and Tord (2010; Sweden; 11 minutes): A fox returns home to find a mirror image of his apartment where a rabbit who shares the same name (hence, Tord and Tord has taken up residence. Created via stop-motion animation evocative of Wes Anderson, this little film is an askew fairy tale from Niki Lindroth von Bahr. It doesn’t add up to much, but the look of it is charming and the length just right for those looking for a quick amusement.

Five Miles Out (2009; England; 18 minutes): Director Andrew Haigh (45 Years [review]) creates a mysterious puzzler. Sent on a trip with relatives to escape troubles at home, Cass (Dakota Blue Richards, The Golden Compass) meets a prickly young boy (Thomas Malone) on his way to a secret cave accessible only by swimming through an underground tunnel. Fearful for the boy’s life, she initially dissuades him from going, and then sits guard the next day when he finally does.

The tension during that wait is excruciating, especially if you can imagine the darkness that must await the youngster once he is below the surface. Haigh is all about holding back here, letting Richards only hint at her emotions. Just like we don’t know what is down in the hole, we can sometimes only guess what the girl must be experiencing.

Also available on the Weekend Blu-ray [review]. Likewise for Haigh’s 2005 six-minute short Cahuenga Blvd, a sketch in verité that doesn’t have nearly the emotion or intrigue of the auteur’s later work.