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Palo Alto Online

Short shrift

by Joe Mader

Everyone knows the Oscars are about glamour, fame and big-name stars. A nomination (or better yet, a win) ensures your name is spread throughout the galaxy, and the lives of the poor and afflicted are momentarily brightened by the recognition of your celestial talent.

Unless, of course, you're nominated for a live-action or animated short film. Then you don't even make it onto the ballot for most Oscar party pools, and people go to the fridge during your acceptance speech.

The five live-action and three animated short films are of varying quality, both technically and artistically, but there are one or two worthies among them. Bear in mind that overt cleverness is often the bane of many a short film. Too often these movies don't mirror the works of great short-fiction writers, and look instead to the unsatisfying twists of O. Henry, where the characters are at the mercy of some smart set-up.

Actor Peter Riegert has actually adapted an O. Henry story in the prettily photographed but inert "By Courier." Two lovers fond of high-blown phrases are about to split over a misunderstanding, but a tough kid go-between reinterprets their fanciful language into straight-talking street lingo and clears everything up. That's about it.

In the colorfully designed "Seraglio," by Gail Lerner and Colin Campbell, an unhappy housewife discovers an unsigned mash note tucked in a garden cabbage. She accuses her neighbor of writing it, and his interest is piqued by the display of passion in the letter. Even though he's not the author, he confesses and sleeps with her. It's awfully cute and mighty unsubstantial.

Paulo Machline's Brazilian film, "Uma Historia de Futebol" ("A Soccer Story"), is a beautifully shot and edited reverie of an older man recalling his participation in a boyhood championship soccer game. But the film chokes with sentimental nostalgia and ends tryingly. (The talented kid who wins the game turns out to be Pele. Bully for him.)

"Quiero Ser" ("I Want to Be"), a Mexican/German co-production by Florian Gallenberger, is well-made and sensitive to the pressures poverty exerts on the two homeless boys it follows. But the ironies of their eventual fate are thick and obvious; the effect is as if O. Henry had reshaped Vittorio De Sica's neorealist masterpiece, "The Bicycle Thief."

By contrast, Joan Stein's U.S./Hungary co-production "One Day Crossing" achieves an amazing depth in its brief 25 minutes. Set in Hungary near the end of the World War II, the film portrays a Jewish family passing as Christian. Theresa, nee Sarah (Erika Marozsan), lives in constant fear of discovery and berates her husband for not getting them out of Europe back in 1939.

One night he harbors a young Jewish boy the same age as their own son, and Theresa is furious with terror. But later she is given a chance to save the young boy at considerable risk to herself and her family, and miraculously she emerges from her dehumanizing terror. Stein doesn't stage the atrocity scenes successfully, but she's wonderful at the small and large emotional shifts and Marozsan's performance is minutely detailed and ardently felt. This is your winner.

Of the three nominees for animated short, Michael Dudok de Wit's elegant and enigmatic "Father and Daughter" would seem to have the best chance. In this UK production, about a daughter whose father mysteriously disappears, de Wit (the only prior Academy nominee in either category) employs brown and amber inks with gentle washes, simple line and flowing movement.

Dan Hertzfeldt's "Rejected" is uproariously inappropriate in its first five minutes, delivering dadaist animated advertisements to his corporate clients, but fizzles in the next and final four. And the Germany/UK co-production, "The Periwig-Maker" by Steffen and Annette Schaffler, employs stop-motion animation, but its tale of 17th-century plague-ridden London, voiced over by Kenneth Branagh, is opaque and macabre.

So mark your ballots for "One Day Crossing" and "Father and Daughter," and amaze your friends with your knowledge of even Oscar's most obscure categories.

All of the Oscar-nominated animated and live-action short films, with the exception of "Quiero Ser," will screen at 12 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at the Roxie Theatre, 16th St. at Valencia in San Francisco. Call (415) 863-1087 for more information.