Oscar shorts go for the long run at MFAH
The kids are definitely not all right. And the parents are to blame.
Four of the five Oscarnominated live-action short films deal with children and how they bear the sins of the generation who gave them life. These films, along with the shorts nominated in the animation and documentary categories, are being shown in separate programs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, beginning Friday and running through March 3.
Hope for the future? Well, if this generation is so messed up, how will the children, who have been taught our bad habits, save us?
Start in 1993 with Vincent Lambe’s “Detainment,” an absorbing film from the United Kingdom based on the infamous murder of 2-year-old James Bulger by two 10-year-old boys, a murder that shocked England. The whole film is the separate police interrogations of the the suspects, getting into the minds of young murderers.
A generation later, we have the young boy who is the conscience of Guy Nattiv’s “Skin,” a hard-towatch portrait of guntoting white supremacist, male-dominated culture in rural Trumpland, and how the son is absorbing all the lessons of his father as his mother helplessly goes along.
And then there are children in peril, thanks to adults. In “Fauve,” Jeremy Comte’s French-Canadian tale starts out as Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, with two boys out on an adventure who stumble onto an apparently abandoned industrial surface mine, where hidden dangers abound.
In Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s terrific Spanish short “Mother,” the child is never seen, but heard. A mother gets a cellphone call from her 6-year-old son, who has been apparently abandoned by her ex-husband on a beach hours away. The suspenseful movie is set in one apartment, with a frantic series of phone calls involving mom and grandma as they try to locate the child.
There may not be much hope for the future in these four shorts, but at least the next generation will have some great actors. All of the children in these shorts are excellent.
The outlier in the liveaction shorts program is my favorite, the beautifully observed “Marguerite,” a French-Canadian movie by Marianne Farley. Simultaneously sad but optimistic, it’s about an elderly woman in the final stages of life whose final friend is the caregiver who makes daily visits. When the woman finds out her caregiver is a lesbian, she harks back to her own lesbian crush from the 1960s, at a time when society confined her to the closet.
Shot indoors in the few small rooms of a house, Farley’s tender, humanistic approach acknowledges wasted lives during generations of intolerance, but also the emerging freedom of modern times. “Marguerite” is bittersweet, but especially within the context of these nominated shorts, it’s message is clear: There is hope for the future after all.
Animation
The live-action shorts are being released concurrently with the nominated animated shorts.
The most widely seen animated short, of course, is Pixar’s “Bao,” Domee Shi’s delightful film of a Chinese-Canadian woman who gets a second chance at motherhood when her dumpling comes to life. The eight-minute short, the first in the 32-year history of the studio to be directed by a woman, was attached to the beginning of Pixar’s summer feature “Incredibles 2.”
A storyboard artist for Pixar since 2011, Shi is now developing a feature for Pixar.
Others in the animation category: “Late Afternoon,” from Ireland’s Cartoon Salon (“The Breadwinner”), is a journey of glimpsed memories through the mind of an elderly woman with dementia; Canada’s “Animal Behaviour,” from Oscar winners Alison Snowden and David Fine (“Bob’s Birthday”), is about a group therapy session for animals; in Canada’s “Weekends,” a young boy in 1980s Toronto shuffles back and forth between his divorced parents’ homes; and in “One Small Step,” a Chinese girl dreams of becoming an astronaut.