The first of this year's live action shorts comes to us from Poland and sets the typically depressing mood for the evening. It follows Julka, a woman working as a maid at a motel. She has little self-confidence, believing herself to be unlovable due to her dwarfism. She's never had a boyfriend either and harbors a crush on Bogdan, a truck driver that often passes by the motel. With the encouragement of a friendly co-worker, Julka gets a sexy dress made for her that fits her body. She has a charming evening with Bogdan but it ends horribly, all the woman's fears and anxieties about men seemingly being confirmed.
In the decade or so I've been making an effort to see the Oscar nominated live action short films, a trend has emerged. Most of the nominated shorts are dour foreign language films about war, suffering, death, or some other depressing topic. “The Dress,” I'm sad to say, fits this stereotype to a tee. It has a fairly promising, if low-key, start. Anna Dzeidduszycka is compelling as Julka. There's a lived-in, realistic quality to the conversations she shares with the other characters in the film. Whether or not the movie is a sensitive portrayal of living with dwarfism is up to debate. The character is still defined by the shape of her body and it informs her entire personality. This includes a sequence where she sobs about wishing she was a “normal woman.” I suspect actual short people would prefer not to be depicted this way but “The Dress” is still fairly even-handed up to that point.
This is before the climax of the film, where Julka's date with Bogdan goes hideously wrong. You can probably guess what happens. This is when “The Dress” begins to feel like what so many of these shorts: A slog of unending misery, that piles more horrible events onto its protagonist for no specific reason. Before a guy treats her like trash, Julka's life is already really sad. Was it necessary to make it worst? The cinematography is pretty but “The Dress” mostly just made me wonder why it had to be so needlessly mean-spirited. I think the point the film wants to make – about the challenges of being different – could've been conveyed without pissing me off so badly. [5/10]
The second depressing topic of the night is, at the very least, one that deserves to be better publicized in the western world. That would be ala kachuu, the tradition of kidnapping a young woman and forcing her into marriage that still happens in some rural regions of Kyrgyzstan. The short follows Sezim, a 19 year old girl who breaks with her traditionalist family. She's gotten a job in a bakery, taken a college entrance exam, and is learning to drive. That is until she's captured one day, shoved into the back of a van, taken to a isolated village, and forced to marry a man she's never met before. Trapped in this horrible situation, she makes every attempt she can to rebel and escape, despite pressure from all the older women in the village to stay and make the best of it.
I had never heard of the practice of ala kachuu before this short, as I'm afraid Krygyz culture is not something I'm especially well read in. It sounds like an edgy joke from a “Borat” movie, a backwards tradition that would've been outlawed decades ago. In fact, bride kidnapping is illegal in Krygyzstan but this has apparently done little to stop the practice. While debate rages over how common it is exactly, with some sources saying the tradition is simply a form of consensual elopement, ala kachuu does seem to be a reality in many portions of the country. So if the practice of films like this is to raise awareness of real world horrors, “Ala Kachuu” accomplishes that.
Approached as an actual movie, instead of a piece of narrative journalism, “Ala Kachuu – Take and Run” is, at least, a persuasive watch. Sezim is a character you can root for immediately, as she bristles against regressive politics from the beginning. Her willingness to stand up for herself makes her likable. That she's surrounded by older women who insists running away would bring shame on the family, or that she should just accept her lot in life as a woman, makes you want to see her successfully escape. This makes “Ala Kachuu” feel like more than just a parade of misery, so that certainly elevates it above some of the other short films I've watched over my years as an Oscar watcher. [7/10]
The shortest of all the nominated films this year – running only twelve minutes – is also the only nominated short this year with a recognizable star behind it. “The Long Goodbye” stars Riz Ahmed, seemingly as a loosely fictionalized version of himself. It begins as another normal day for a family of Islamic people living in the U.K. Riz plays with a small cousin of his, his friend flirts with a girl, the dad tries to watch TV, and his sisters do their hair upstairs. It's as normal a situation as you can imagine. That all changes when a group of white men, wielding guns, arrive and begin to round up every brown person in the neighborhood. This state-sanctioned act of racial violence escalates to predictably grim results.
"The Long Goodbye" is no less grim than your usual Oscar-nominated live action short. At least the film has a fairly salient point. We live in a time when acts like this, far-right skinheads deciding to systematically perform acts of racial violence in our cities while the cops look the other way, seem all too probable. “The Long Goodbye” does a good job of establishing a sense of normalcy, of regular daily life, before the all-too-possible violence breaks out. That certainly makes it a bracing watch in the second half. The shaky-cam visuals director Aneil Karia employs are maybe a bit distracting but it does add a documentary-like immediacy to the what is depicted here.
The only thing about “The Long Goodbye” that gives me pause is its extended epilogue. After the story more-or-less ends, Ahmed begins to perform a spoken-word rap about his racial identity and his frustration with the prejudice he's encountered in his life. And Ahmed is a very talented actor and even displays a pretty good sense of flow here. It's just an odd creative choice, to have a well executed and fairly serious-minded short like this conclude with the actor showing off his rapping skills like that. I don't mind seeing Ahmed perform but “The Long Goodbye” would have been just as powerful and effective if it had ended right before this puzzling sequence. [7/10]
There's usually one excessively sentimental and weepy short among the nominees each year and here's 2022's edition. “On My Mind” begins with a disheveled man entering a karaoke bar. He orders a drink and asks if the machine has the song “You Were Always On My Mind” on it. He attempts to sing while the bartender records the performance on his phone. This is interrupted several times, much to the annoyance of the accountant working in the bar. Soon, we learn why the man is so determined to sing this song and make this recording today. His wife is about to be taken off life support and he wants him singing to be the last thing she hears before she dies.
“On My Mind” works best when you're wondering where it's going. Obviously, the man in the bar is facing some challenges in his life. You don't know exactly why singing this song is so important to him but clearly it is. You feel bad for the guy as his attempts to record himself singing are repeatedly interrupted. When he finally, tearfully explains what is going on, it makes everything that happened before much more meaningful. The final scene is the short at its most heart-tugging and it brings around the idea of the breath left on a glass representing the human soul.
The problem with “On My Mind” is it stops making sense if you think about it for more than a minute. Why doesn't he just sing the song to his wife as she's unplugged? Why must he make a recording of himself at a karaoke bar? Isn't it odd that he's spending the precious remaining hours of his beloved's life in a bar? This exposes “On My Mind's” role as glurge, sentimental goop that is meant to make you cry and not meant to be examined too closely. On that surface level, “On My Mind” works fairly well but stuff like this probably doesn't deserve the Academy's attention. [6/10]
“Please Hold” is set in what seems to be the near future. It follows a young man named Mateo. On his way to his minimum wage job, he's accosted by a police drone and informed that he's been arrested. When he asks why, he's threatened with a tasing. Carted off to an automated, for-profit prison, he's left in a cell with a touch screen monitor. The computerized menu he's presented with does nothing to answer his questions, only asking him if he's pleading guilty or not. He attempts to contact the police but, because phone calls are three dollars a minute, his bank account is depleted while he's on hold. The cheapest lawyer is 10,000 dollars. He does low-paying prison labor to build up enough money to call his mom to get a loan. After 90 days, he's forced to plead guilty or not, despite never being told what crime he's being charged with. In fact, he talks to very few people during his time in prison.
“Please Hold” is the most depressing of this year's nominated shorts but also the funniest, the most insightful, and the most entertaining. It presents what feels like an all-too probable vision of our future. The film takes the idea of being stuck on hold with an obnoxious automated system, trying to get a question answered, and extends it to its dystopian extreme. The menu that gives Mateo the grim information that he could go to prison for forty years, if he's found guilty, is presented by a patronizing, cutesy cartoon mascot. The prison labor program he works with is presented like a wholesome start-up business. Every time he is served lunch, his bank account dips a little lower. He almost ends up pleading guilty, because the robots are threatening him and not a single human soul is present to relate to him on a normal level.
It's obvious from the beginning that Mateo is not guilty of any crime, that he's been mistaken for another person. Which raises issues of police racism, since the implication is that the increasingly automated police system can't tell the difference between different brown people. By the time this is acknowledged and he's released from prison, he's unemployed and homeless. (All of these messages are delivered via automation.) If all of this sounds incredibly bleak, that's because it is. But “Please Hold” is also fresh, funny, and energetically paced. There's enough pep in how the story is told, enough humor in Mateo's frustration with this situation, to keeps things light-hearted. Even while the film is making a fatalistic, and all too likely, statement about the near future of our increasingly corporate, machine-run world. [8/10]
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