The animated entries aren’t visually weird or off-putting, and the live-action entries aren’t unrelentingly depressing. The overall “mood mix” is varied, with a pleasant balance of serious, gently moral and laugh-out-loud amusing.
That said, one live-action entry is quite bizarre ... and we’ll get to that.
Starting with animation, I’ve always been impressed by filmmakers who tell their stories without dialogue, making them immediately approachable to viewers throughout the world. Two of this year’s entries take that approach.
U.S. writer/directors Nathan Engelhardt and Jeremy Spears deliver a fascinating blend of carved wood elements and CGI in Forevergreen, a charming little tale about an orphaned bear cub “adopted” by a fatherly tree. Their bond is strong until the bear reaches young adulthood, at which point it’s tempted by the allure of easy human food: something the wise, long-lived tree knows could be dangerous.
This film’s overall look is enchanting. Engelhardt and Spears wanted their bear to be “tree-like,” to strengthen the viewer’s impression of their rapport; the gentle CGI elements definitely deliver that emotional note.
This 13-minute film’s conclusion is a heart-tugger, so be prepared.
Russian director Konstantin Bronzit’s The Three Sisters employs classic, hand-drawn 2D animation, in an exaggerated style that enhances his story’s broadly comic elements. (No, this has nothing to do with Chekhov.) Three devout sisters live a quiet life on a barren, isolated island that pokes out of the ocean like the upper half of a beach ball.
Supplies are deliver periodically by boat; the women pay with coins from a carefully guarded purse, which — horrors! — one day falls into the sea. Now forced to earn money by renting out one of their homes, the dynamic shifts abruptly when the new lodger turns out to be a grizzled fellow as coarse as they are delicate.
Except they don’t stay that way, once they vie for his attention...
This core story is hilarious enough on its own, but Bronzit adds plenty of droll sight gags that are even funnier, thanks to his animation style.
Irish director John Kelly’s Retirement Plan also employs hand-drawn 2D animation, in a flat, minimalist style that intentionally avoids flourish. Domhnall Gleeson voices Ray, a man who contemplates everything he’ll be able to do in retirement, once he finally “has time.” Each of his imaginings is animated briefly, in a mildly amusing manner.
“I will finish all those books I started, I will play the lifetime of computer games I missed out on, I’ll bird watch, I’ll learn magpies are beautiful.” And so forth.
The dialogue feels like a poem that might have been published in The New Yorker, which has championed this film. But the result isn’t such a much, and wears out its welcome despite running only a brief seven minutes.
He then narrates the subsequent action, as his childhood self — a poor street urchin — shelters one night in an abandoned apartment that shares a wall with a family, where a young girl is cruelly neglected. She cries each night, overwhelmed by sorrow, and — to the boy’s astonishment — her tears form two perfect pearls, which roll across the floor and, thanks to a crack in the wall, into his hands.
What follows involves a ruthless pawnbroker, a jewelry merchant, and the boy’s awareness that choosing incorrectly — between love and fortune — could damn his soul.
The set design is astonishing: Lavis and Szczerbowski built an entire miniature dockside town. Everything contributes to the old-world atmosphere, including Patrick Watson’s haunting score. The puppetry is fascinating. CGI is employed to animate the mouths of the little girl and her grandfather, but the characters in the past have fixed expressions, like classic puppets, and emote solely via gesture and pantomime.
If voters recognize and reward the sheer scale of effort, this one could win.
I suspect, however, that the Oscar will go to France’s Florence Miaihe, for Butterfly, her poignant retelling of Olympic swimmer Alfred Hakache’s life. She employs a captivating “paint-on-glass” style that adds a touching note to this amazing saga.
A man swims in the ocean, using butterfly strokes. Memories flood to the surface — some glorious, some happy, some traumatic — as he dips above and beneath gentle waves.
Hakache was born in 1915, the youngest child in a Jewish family that lived in French-controlled Algeria. He overcame an initial fear of the water, and won his first swimming competition at the age of 16. He placed second in the 1934 French Championships, and subsequently joined the French team at Berlin’s Summer Olympics. They finished fourth in the 4x200-meter freestyle relay, ahead of Germany’s team.
Much happened during the next decade and change, and — not wanting to spoil the dramatic impact — suffice to say that Hakache, Agnes Keleti and Ben Helfgott are the only known Jewish athletes to have competed in the Olympics after surviving the Holocaust.
Miaihe’s connection is deeply personal; she learned to swim with one of Hakache’s brothers. The impressionistic animation often resembles a fluid painting, which perfectly fits the story. Her film is both beautiful and intensely powerful.
Shifting to live action, U.S. director Sam A. Davis’ The Singers is adapted from an 1850 short story written by Ivan Turgenev. The setting is a lowly American dive bar on a cold, snow-driven night. The place is half-filled with an assortment of grumpy, downtrodden men, some of them probably alcoholics, who grump at each other with profane belligerence.
Wanting to lighten the mood, the bartender (Michael Young) proposes an impromptu sing-off: a suggestion met with scoffs of contempt ... until one man responds. And then another...
Davis cast his film with singing talents from the unlikeliest corners of the Internet; Young, as just one example, is a viral subway busker and former America’s Got Talent contestant. Although this 18-minute charmer begins slowly, Davis builds events to a deeply touching conclusion, then adds a fleeting — and hilarious — final scene.
The story begins during the reading of a will, as the barrister (Stephen Fry) faces two young men across a table: 17-year-old JJ (Alistair Nwachukwu), curious and mildly uneasy; and Scott (Oscar Lloyd), insufferably arrogant and racist.
The story then emerges in flashback. Miriam Margolyes stars as Dorothy, a lonely widow whose body is failing, while her mind remains as sharp as ever. Her dreary daily routine of pills, prunes and crosswords is rent asunder when JJ accidentally kicks his football into her garden.
Dorothy, blessed with an acute ability to read people, instinctively perceives an artistic bent in the young man. She has him read aloud from a book: a telling passage from Matthew López’s play, The Inheritance. JJ becomes a regular visitor as the days and weeks pass, and — despite being worlds apart — the two become fast friends over shared interests.
Knight’s film isn’t merely charming — Margolyes and Nwachukwu are adorable together — but also possesses a strong moral, and a palpable emotional punch. It warrants repeat viewing.
That certainly isn’t the case with the French production of Two People Exchanging Saliva, the longest entry, at 36 minutes. Co-directors and writers Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh imagine a dystopian alternate universe society, where people pay for things by receiving slaps to the face (!), and kissing is punishable by death (!!).
In order to reduce the possibility of succumbing to the latter, everybody routinely eats onions, garlic and other foul-smelling items, and then “huffs” their breath into the face of guards stationed in front of every store. An off-camera narrator (Vicky Krieps) supplies additional minor details.
The story follows the initially unhappy Angine (Zar Amir Ebrahimi), who shops compulsively in a department store, where she catches the eye of a perky salesgirl named Malaise (Luàna Bajrami). Alexandra de Saint’s monochrome cinematography is so crisp that everything seems to have sharp edges, adding a further disorienting note.
But the point of Musteata and Singh’s absurdist saga of bourgeois sadness eludes me, except perhaps as a parable of the way desire can overcome fear, despite extreme government subjugation. The premise is simply stupid; if intimacy is illegal, how would this society survive more than a single generation?
The year is 1813. We meet Miss Estrogenia Talbot (Aks) just as she receives a long-awaited marriage proposal from her beloved Mr. Dickley (Ta’imua). But then — horrors! — he discovers that she’s bleeding, for a reason Austen never saw fit to discuss. Believing her injured, he rushes her home, where sisters Labinia (Samantha Smart) and Vagianna (Nicole Alyse Nelson) beg her not to imperil the engagement, by telling Mr. Dickey the truth. This opinion is shared by their father, Mr. Father (Hugo Armstrong).
Matters get increasingly uproarious, as Estrogenia opts to share every little bloody detail. The performances are deliberately over the top, but otherwise the production design, Regency-era costumes and lush cinematography are Austen-perfect. While I lament that it’s over too quickly, I respect Pinder and Aks for knowing when to get their cast off the stage.
Finally, Israeli writer/director Meyer Levinson-Blount’s Butcher’s Stain is almost certain to take this Oscar. His somber 26-minute film — with a story that could be set today, in the real world — carries a powerful message of tolerance, reflexive suspicion, and the often rash impulse to condemn too quickly.
Samir (Omar Sameer), a Palestinian butcher, works in an Israeli supermarket. He’s affable and jovial with customers, many of whom insist on having him serve them. His personal life isn’t as cheerful. His ex-wife abuses the shared custody arrangement concerning their adolescent son, and — not wanting to make things worse — Samir reluctantly tolerates it.
One fateful day, Samir’s manager demands a private audience in her office, and coldly says that he has been accused of tearing down the Israeli hostage posters in the store’s shared break room.
Levinson-Blount holds on Samir’s initially mute reaction for a very long time, during which Sameer’s eyes convey a wealth of emotions: confusion, disbelief, fear, uncertainty and — finally — carefully controlled anger. He denies the charge.
The story suspensefully builds to a finale laced with a shattering twist that evokes the best “gotcha” conclusions in The Twilight Zone. Except that this isn’t fantasy; it could — and likely does — happen to actual people.
The final scene breaks the fourth wall, as Samir looks directly into the camera. Levinson-Blount’s message: It’s up to us, to fix this sort of thing.
Powerful stuff.
No comments:
Post a Comment