‘OSCAR-NOMINATED SHORT FILMS: LIVE ACTION’ Faces, stories linger longer than you’d think ⁄
As an oddly shaped, highly stimulating gang of five, this year’s slate of live-action short films up for an Oscar contains a couple of hours of cinema more worthwhile than 90 percent of what’s out there at the moment.
Therefore you should see the “Oscar-Nominated Short Films: Live Action” program at Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences appears to have made some unusually strong decisions this year.
In one regard, this year is like most years. The nominated live-action shorts offer something for folks who require familiar, English-speaking talent, and lots more for folks who don’t.
In the familiar category, we have director Mat Kirkby’s 21-minute playlet, “The Phone Call,” from England. Sally Hawkins plays Heather, a crisis center worker. On the other end of the line, unseen but heard, is Jim Broadbent as a desperate fellow named Stanley, two years a widower. What happens between these two? Nothing flashy, nothing twisty, just honest, carefully modulated hesitation and anguish, and a sustained reminder of just how vividly Hawkins conveys a woman whose heart is on the verge of an awakening.
That heart stuff isn’t for everybody, of course. In the Israeli-French coproduction “Aya,” another standout, a woman is mistaken for a visiting music competition judge’s driver at a busy airport. Rather than own up to the innocent deception (Aya, played by the luminous No MPAA rating. Running time: 1:56 Opens: Friday Sarah Adler, was doing a chauffeur a favor by holding up his sign), she delays the revelation.
The stranger from Denmark (Ulrich Thomsen) can’t quite determine what to make of Aya, and vice versa. Once the cat’s out of the bag, the flirtation changes keys.
“Let me tell you something,” he says to her. “Never follow your heart.” This, Aya senses, is the statement of a man who doesn’t believe his own axioms.
And because Aya “feels close to people I don’t know,” co-directors Mihal Brezis and Oded Binnun generate considerable romantic suspense.
My favorite of these five, however, is the FrenchChinese “Butter Lamp,” a striking series of vignettes in which groups of Tibetans of all ages, plus an animal or two, gather in front of a shifting series of backdrops to be photographed.
Doesn’t sound like much. Yet director Hu Wei’s eye is unerring, and for a 15-minute short there’s an astonishing amount of resonance. The other two, “Boogaloo and Graham” (from Northern Ireland’s Michael Lennox) and Iranian director Talkhon Hamzavi’s “Parvaneh,” are engaging and wellcrafted.
Beyond “Butter Lamp,” the films contain no great stylistic risks. But the faces linger, and faces are the first and last stroke of magic in any screen language.