March 1, 2010: The New Tenants
The second of the Oscar-nominated live-action short films for 2009 that I saw, The New Tenants is the one with the most star power on hand, and ultimately was the one to win the award. I was surprised to see it win, since I figured that sombre films representing real human pain and suffering tend to win these awards, rather than comedic gangster-type movies with fictional human pain and suffering. I’m perfectly happy with The New Tenants winning. It is from Denmark, but could be easily mistaken for American. It runs about 20 minutes.
We start off at a leisurely pace with two men sitting in their newly rented apartment and bickering about life and death, and the particulars of how they ended up in this new apartment. Within a short time they have become acquainted with a number of their new neighbours, including a nice old lady who wants to borrow a cup of flour to make some cinnamon buns for her granddaughter, an angry husband looking for his wife, and a drug-dealing acquaintance of the former tenant. All of these characters and more converge on the apartment in a Tarantino-esque climax of brutal violence, and the new tenants do the only thing they can do – puzzle at the situation and then start dancing. Roll the recipe for the cinnamon buns the old lady was making instead of the end credits (don’t worry, the real credits follow), and the film’s quirkiness cred is sealed.
Confounding, funny, tragic, all at once.
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