This year’s slate of Best Short (Live Action) Oscar-nominated films are each a rumination on familial connection and what such a primeval part of the human experience means in these globalized times. In all five of the films, characters ponder their attachment to a family member, weighing whether the little bit of good and stability they get from their relations (in four of the films, the key familial relation is sibling-hood) is enough to make up for all the negative consequences of being tied to someone. Family is not chosen, but the connections people in 2020 can make via the internet are; this is what each of the five Best Short (Live Action) nominees are grappling with.
Two of the five films take place in Tunisia and emphasize the bonds (and/or lack thereof) between brothers. Nefta Football Club is certainly the lightest of all the nominated shorts, in both tone and content. The basic premise of the film is something like this: a drug mule, but literally. Two young brothers stumble upon a mule wearing headphones and laden with cocaine, though only one of the boys is street-wise enough to recognize the narcotics for what they are. They decide to take the drugs back to their home, where the older, wiser brother is going to work to arrange a buyer. Meanwhile, the narco-traffickers argue about the lost mule, which has been trained to return home from Algeria (crossing the border into Tunisia bearing illicit materials) upon hearing the proper song in the headphones. Nefta Football Club pays off on its idea that the younger, naïve brother has no idea what the powder is in a funny, worthwhile way. But it is a cheesy film that strains too hard to squeeze laughs out of too-predictable one-liners.
The other Tunisian film. Brotherhood is more or less the opposite in tone and content. It is about a poor shepherding family in the under-developed mountains of Tunisia when the oldest of three brothers returns home after having abruptly run away to fight jihad in Syria years before. While his mother and two brothers are thrilled to have him back, his father is not so quick to forgive his abandonment of the family. To complicate matters, the prodigal son has come back with a pregnant, teenaged bride. Brotherhood tensely explores what each of these characters owes one another, what they owe their society, their culture and the world. What does it mean to live in the world as a young Arab man in 2020? What are one’s obligations to family, to strangers and to the nation? Brotherhood is as serious as Nefta Football Club is a lark, even though both films are centered on the sibling relationship between young brothers in Tunisia.
Two of the other nominees explore the relationship between sisters. Saria focuses on two orphaned teenagers in Guatemala who are barely surviving in a brutal orphanage. This one is based on a true story and, like many films that boast that claim, it allows its grounding in reality to camouflage haphazard storytelling (i.e., it does not have to make sense because it actually happened). The two sisters in Saria plot an escape from their dour circumstances that will culminate in their reaching the United States. Whether or not the older sister can bring along her boyfriend is a brief plot point, but it gets yada-yada-ed away rather quickly. What was introduced as two (or maybe three, pending the boyfriend) children absconding from the orphanage becomes a mass jailbreak—how it came to include all the orphans interned in the institution is never explained—that ultimately fails. Terribly, 41 of the girls in the orphanage then died in a fire they set as another escape attempt. Saria is a poorly-made film that is loud without being exciting and rests too easily upon its claim to real-life tragedy; it manipulates the viewer into taking it seriously—even though it does not deserve it on the merits of the filmmaking—simply because it is covering an event where 41 real-life people died.
The other film about sisters requires stretching the definition of sisterhood a bit. A Sister is a gripping thriller that truly leaves the viewer hanging on every second of action and every syllable of dialogue. It begins quietly, with a man and a woman in a speeding car in Belgium, the woman dialing up her sister on the phone to beg forgiveness for being late to pick up her child who was in the sister’s care. What is revealed a couple of minutes in to A Sister is that the woman did not actually call her sister; whether she even has a sister or a child is not clear. Instead, she had called the Belgian equivalent of 911 and is speaking to a female emergency responder; the woman in the car is being kidnapped and using the sister-as-babysitter plot as a ruse to call for help. Much like Brotherhood, A Sister interrogates the strength of connections in our current society and wonders what we each owe to each other. The kidnapper will honor the real bonds of sisterhood and motherhood, allowing his victim to seek intervention from strangers. The responder begins to feel something akin to a sisterly love for the woman in the car. The film poses salient questions about anonymity, femininity and obligation. And it does all of that while being white-knuckle tense and running barely 16 minutes!
The fifth and final Short Film (Live Action) nominated for a 2020 Oscar is The Neighbors’ Window. It is set in Brooklyn and is the only nominee in English, so it is likely to win on the big night. It is an effecting film, though it does actually drag a bit in its second act (it may seem like an oxymoron for a short film to have a lull, but this one really does). The premise of The Neighbors’ Window is that a married couple approaching forty, with three small children, demanding jobs and fading physical beauty, become obsessed with their window-neighbors across the street. Those neighbors are fit, gorgeous socialites who have kickass parties and kickass sex without having any drapes. The older couple are constantly spying and their jealous nostalgia for the lives they feel like they once had, which their younger neighbors are still living, threatens to fracture their marriage. But then tragedy strikes the neighbors and it turns out those hot, young sex addicts across the street were just as jealous of the mature, made-it-and-have-the-kids-to-prove-it older couple as the older couple was envious of them. It reduces to a pat cliché of a denouement, but it is a good film and worthy of the Oscar it is likely to win.
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