Short and bittersweet

The Film Festival in brief

by Peter Keough

Like the short story and the lyric poem, the short-film format allows an artist to focus on a few elements and refine them into something craftsmanlike, perhaps visionary. It's also an invitation to self-indulgent folly. To the compilers' credit, few of those shorts are showing in this year's Boston Film Festival program. Most of the entries demonstrate a mastery of the craft. Some even show signs of genius.

Craft is effortlessly demonstrated in Joshua Marston's "Trifecta" (Program IV: September 10 at 10:15 a.m. and 12:05, 1:50, and 3:50 p.m.), an even lower-rent variation on Wayne Wang's Smoke in which playwright Israel Horovitz plays a penurious Brooklynite who sees fate in discarded briefcases and racing forms. For intimations of genius, though, there's Pablo Proenza's superbly accomplished "ViDi" (Program II: September 9 at 10:45 a.m. and 12:45 and 2:45 p.m. and September 10 at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). The Latin title might seem a little pretentious, the dystopian premise a bit adolescent and shopworn, but Proenza's 33-minute masterpiece is a haunting nightmare.

We're in the increasingly popular not-too-distant-future, and telecommunications, computers, and video have virtually supplanted real experience. College student Ethan (Lisandro Perez, who looks like a young Orson Welles in shock) keeps in touch with his girlfriend Aisha (Leisa Bolles) via videophone in his stark, spotless apartment. After nearly being carjacked (while talking to Aisha on his car videophone, much to her delight), he withdraws even further into a world of futuristic technological ennui that Proenza re-creates with the creepy atmosphere and acute details of a Stanley Kubrick or a David Cronenberg.

Like many feature films this year, shorts seem preoccupied with the millennium -- though not many handle the Apocalypse with the grace of Proenza. The title of Jeffrey Hendricks's "Jesus of Wall Street" (Program III: September 9 at 5, 7 and 9 p.m.) pretty much says it all, as the Second Coming finds our Lord scrounging in dumpsters, shaking down stockbrokers, and redistributing wealth in the form of takeout for his fellow homeless. It's sophomoric, for the most part, though some of the proverbs of the latter-day Sermon on the Mount have a twisted subversiveness. Neither does Edwin Baker's "The Confession" (Program II) break any new theological or cinematic ground in its predictable dialogue between a lapsed Catholic and a sadistic priest.

Another popular topic in features that's getting reflected in shorts is alternative sexuality and gender identity. A chilling, brilliantly narrated exploration into male pathology, Joseph Harris's "Rapscallions" (Program II) is a kind of In the Company of Homopathic Men in which four young men in a car cruise for trouble and bare the meanness of their souls.

A less successful look at intolerance is Ginger R. Rinkenberger's "What Became Known As . . . the Eleanor Affair" (Program III), in which a small town is scandalized in 1939 after two women members of the committee to welcome Eleanor Roosevelt are found naked in each other's arms. Rinkenberger must have seen Strictly Ballroom one too many times, as this titillating premise degenerates into broad humor, shameless mugging, and gaudy song-and-dance numbers.

Women, in general, don't fare too well in this year's selection of shorts. Fiona Cochrane's "Gorilla Girls" (Program III) centers on the title women's basketball team, a crew of misfits given one last chance to win. Although the characters do evoke a certain Rocky-like sympathy, their weaknesses and problems -- shown in flashback whenever a timeout is called -- reduce them to weak-sister stereotypes. At least "Gorilla Girls" has fun, unlike "Her Violet Garden" (Program IV), in which Irena Joannides fails to achieve sufficient artistic distance from powerful autobiographical material -- the relationships among herself, her mother, and her grandmother in the ruins of the 1974 war in Cyprus -- to rise above cliché and bathos.

In depicting generations of women in the face of mortality, Joannides could have taken a cue from Anne Madden's "First Daughter" (Program IV), the understated, unsentimental, and beautifully acted story of a little Vietnamese girl whose father's death has left her preoccupied with heart disease until her grandmother introduces her to shadow puppets. But perhaps the strongest voice in this year's shorts is that of children. That's certainly the case with Dylan Kidd's "Ian's Ghost" (Program III), in which a little boy staying at his aunt's house during his mother's illness happens on a world of evil reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe via Henry James. Or perhaps most fittingly in Fred Muchnik's charming 90-second "What's in a Cloud?" (Program II), which sums up cinema as a child's imagination transforming shapes and shadows into a dream.

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