Before a Kings of Leon concert in D.C. last night, I saw the Oscar nominated live-action shorts. To be honest, this lineup is not as strong as last year's or the year before. The deserving winner is clear: Avant Que De Tout Perdre (Just Before Losing Everything). It is the 30-minute story of an abused French wife escaping her husband along with her two children. The performances are strong, and it slowly builds to an absolute fever pitch of suspense as a close call threatens their bid for freedom, but also possesses a realistic and subtle quality, never lapsing into sensationalistic action or melodrama. The director is Xavier Legrand, who many years ago played a small role in the beloved Au revoir les enfants and should now have a bright future as a director.



The Voorman Problem, the only short in English, is a playful, Twilight Zone style yarn which finds a psychiatrist (Martin Freeman) visiting a prison to treat a jailed man (Tom Hollander) who claims he is a god and has convinced the other inmates to worship him. It is clever, but too thinly conceived. The ending is downright abrupt. They could have done more with this neat, provocative concept even within the confines of a short.



Pitääkö Mun Kaikki Hoitaa? (Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?) from Finland is also charming, but slight. It plays as the opening scene of a comedy: a family's hectic morning becomes more and more absurd as they race to get to a wedding on time. As their comic desperation mounts, it becomes fairly easy to predict the twist, but it still put a smile on my face.



The Danish short Helium has a couple beautiful images, but the storyline tugs at viewers' heartstrings in overly blunt ways (it is the story of a hospital janitor who befriends a dying child and tells him of a science-fiction style heaven called Helium), and a question lingered in my mind throughout to the point of distraction: it is mentioned the child has a mom and a dad, so why are they never at his bedside? Particularly during his last days. A grating contrivance to justify the unusual friendship at the core of the plot.



Focused on a pair of Spanish doctors' fateful experience in a war-torn African country, Aquel No Era Yo (That Wasn't Me) is a well-intentioned argument against the use of child soldiers and has intense, you-are-there cinematography, but it crowds a great deal of Big Moments into its relatively brief length and, at one point, transitions into an improbable blend of Blood Diamond and a rape-revenge fantasy. It is ultimately unconvincing and leaves one feeling a bit betrayed and dirty rather than enraged or moved.