Salute Your Shorts: Eros

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

Discussing Coffee and Cigarettes two weeks ago, we took a look at Jim Jarmusch’s construction of a feature made out of shorts and how it's largely akin to the construction of a well-made book of short stories. His collection really is the exception that proves the rule, though, with its tightly constructed formalism and interplay between the works—not to mention finally showing us what happens when Iggy Pop meets up with Tom Waits.

Short films these days are usually only collected in anthology films like Eros, where there’s a bunch of shorts and a general theme that allows them to be feature-length. While Jarmusch’s film had clear literary precedent, anthology features seem more related to another of film’s forefathers: museum and gallery exhibitions. These shorts may have little to do with one another but are gathered together nonetheless, not so much commenting on each others’ works so much as coexisting in the same general space. Interplay between them is coincidental and the experience of watching these things can be a bit schizophrenic.

For reasons unclear, anthology films also tend to be rather disappointing, if still interesting; Eros is no exception. The expectation that every short should be equally great seems to play some part in this, as does the difficulty of feature-film directors switching to a much shorter length they’re not used to working in. But still, anthologies just seem to have bad luck for some reason, regardless of how interesting they sound from a distance. 

Cannes actually commissioned an anthology film two years ago to celebrate its 60th anniversary, but for those caught up in its hullabaloo, Eros should be just as interesting since it’s a collection of shorts by Cannes favorites Wong Kar-Wai, Michelangelo Antonioni and Steven Soderbergh (whose The Girlfriend Experience is also being released this week at the festival). The film was compiled as a form of tribute to Antonioni, who was more than 90 when it was created. Linking the three films is another tribute to Antonioni, a song in his name by Caetano Veloso accompanied by rather, well, lascivious drawings. Both Kar-Wai and Soderbergh’s films are dedicated to him, which is fitting given that “Eros” here is pretty much a byword for sex, and few have done as much on film to celebrate the subject as Antonioni.

Little else ties the three films together. Roger Ebert described this conundrum best, writing, “Are the three films in Eros intended to be (a) erotic, (b) about eroticism or (c) both?” The compilation begins, in its American release, with Kar-Wai’s “The Hand.” The short opens with an apprentice tailor taking work with a call girl who explains that he cannot properly dress a woman unless he has some experience with a woman…though only with her hand. This becomes a metaphor for their oblique relationship, where she always keeps him at arms length while he never ceases in his obsession with this first love. When she comes upon hard times and loses work, they meet again under significantly changed circumstances, but the tailor is still in love. 

“The Hand” actually does show the influence of Antonioni on how Kar-Wai captures sexuality in all of his films. With some help from cinematographer Christopher Doyle, “The Hand” searches for sensual shots to convey emotion, oftentimes in long takes where little occurs aside from a beautifully-framed scene. Meaning comes from characters’ surroundings and music more than themselves, who, like many of Kar Wai’s characters, are actually pretty stoic throughout despite the melodrama. It’s almost remarkable how little actually happens in the short, but this simplicity works to its advantage. The shortcoming for this piece is its heavy-handedness (yep, pun intended). Piling so much emotional weight into the metaphor of a hand is a mistake, which makes the short feel a little like a student film and less like Kar Wai’s generally subtler, even oblique, features. 

Kar Wai’s short is relatively successful, and while not a grand gesture, it’s a piece that works as homage without being strictly derivative. It’s borders on erotic at moments, even if this aspect is thrown into a blender of fetishism and metaphor. Its commentary on love and sex isn’t particularly novel, though, so it lacks any particular punch. Soderbergh’s “Equilibrium,” on the other hand (unintended this time), is strong for similar reasons, but due to its unconventionality ends up as the best part of Eros. 

Like “The Hand,”  “Equilibrium” is beautiful, both in its colorful opening and its period black-and-white. Antonioni’s influence can be seen here in the sheer emphasis on this imagery and composition, to the point where this obscure short may actually be Soderbergh’s best-looking film. But the short’s real gift is in its unexpected self-reflexivity, which comments both on film and love at the same time. To Soderbergh, nothing is more boring than another person’s obsessive longing, their innermost feelings, even for a person paid to listen to it. This causes a psychiatrist played by Alan Arkin to avoid listening to his client, a typically impressive Robert Downey Jr., and focus on his own love life despite the obvious difficulty and deceit this involves.

“Equilibrium” acts like a short play, where knowledge of what’s seen and unseen is they key element of its construction. But drawing further from this, it emphasizes the ways film can change temporal and spatial relationships. It’s a big joke about what’s important in the frame and in life, and also provides a humorous explanation of the snooze button while it’s at it.  Like Kar-Wai, Soderbergh here doesn’t have particularly grand ambitions. Focusing on each individual’s self-absorbed view of love is a lot more novel, though, and like most of his independent works, is different enough to be interesting if for nothing more than style. Oddly enough, its joking tone hides the deepest third of Eros.

The problem, though, with this kind of anthology, is that the weak sections almost always overpower the good ones. It’s particularly an issue when the weak sections are not just a waste of time, but also almost offensively bad. Enter "The Dangerous Thread of Things," Eros' third and final short, which almost seems to also be an homage to Antonioni, but one where the director completely missed the point of what made his films great. This would be funny if the short wasn't so lousy. It’s a combination of argument and soft-core art pornography that fails to tell much of a story, let alone give a convincing reason why one of its female leads wears a transparent blouse...for the entirety of the movie.

All of its stylistic impulses seem self-parodic, from typically long Antonioni shots to hip-but-meaningless conversations on love and sex. It was a sad coda for Antonioni that even calls into question elements of his previous films. More so, it’s probably too much for audiences.  The sheer inescapable unevenness of anthology films overshadows the parts that are worthwhile, especially in an age when attention spans are waning exponentially. Eros is still worth a rental, but it’s a hard thing to recommend as a whole since the sum of its parts are so different, unless perhaps you really hate Antonioni and want to bash him at his lowest. 

Is a film still good if 30 minutes of it are great, 30 are quite good, and 30 are abysmal? If a feature worked out this way, then no, not really. Here the answer is less simple, but I’d be hard pressed to argue that the films were augmented by being placed together like this.