MUBI had some short films that were going to leave the platform by the end of July, so we lined up a few, all of them, coincidentally, focused on children.
LICK THE STAR (1998) (B) - This is a trifle with training wheels from a young Sofia Coppola, who embeds among junior-high girls in all their hormonal cattiness.
She would put it all together quickly the following year with her feature debut, "The Virgin Suicides." Here she mixes in some ringers with actual students to tell the story of the rise and fall of an alpha female who leads a group of girls intent on poisoning the boys at their school. The code name "lick the star" is roughly a reverse of "kill the rats," and rat poison is the tool the girls plan to use.
Coppola creates that lethargic mood that she would make her calling card, a Southern California ennui that is still milked effectively to this day by the likes of Lana Del Rey. Daddy springs for the rights to some cool alternative chick music (like the Go-Go's, Free Kitten and Kim Deal's the Amps. In a mere 14 minutes, Coppola creates a neat story arc and a thoughtful rumination on adolescence.
THE NEST (B+) - The intense Hlynur Palmason ("A White White Day," "Godland") spins a spare tale of siblings building a clubhouse over the course of a year. While respect is given to the harsh change of seasons, Plamason retains a sense of frivolity.
He sets his camera firmly in one place, as if he were planning to show us a time-lapse video from beginning to end. But he chops it up, with few scenes lasting more than 30 seconds in this 22-minute short. There is hardly any dialogue, much of it incidental. We see the structure grow from a simple pole out in the middle of nowhere into a sophisticated elevated play area.
The kids are mischievous, at one point showing how fun it is to let a big heavy disc, like a manhole cover, drop down and wedge sideways into the soil. Tragedy hits when one of the kids -- they usually are irresponsibly unsupervised, like the old days -- plummets to the ground like that disc. The subsequent scenes are reduced to two of the children, and Palmason makes you wonder if the third survived or will ever return. In the end, this is a spirited peek into the innocence of childhood and the joy of invention and play.
TUESDAY (2016) (B-minus) - Not to be confused with the recent dud starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, this short spends 11 minutes with a 16-year-old girl coping with a loss. It's from Charlotte Wells, who splashed magnificently in 2022 with her full-length debut "Aftersun."
It's difficult to talk about the plot without divulging too much. The first half of the film involves Allie (xx) going about the mundane tasks of her day, nagged and annoyed by family and friends. She is eager to get to her father's house, where she is scheduled to spend the night. What we find out when she gets there is quite moving, in part because the heaviness of the situation is referred to only obliquely. It's really not more than a germ of an idea, though, more of a film exercise than a fully realized film. It serves to set the table nicely for "Aftersun," sharing with it the nuances, happy and sad, found in the father-daughter relationship.
BONUS TRACKS
It's Tammy & the Ampersands with Tipp City, the kickoff song in "Lick the Star":
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