Encounters Film Festival, normally based in Bristol, is the UK’s biggest short film festival, showcasing the best of short films from both the UK and the wider world. This year, as with so many other festivals, it’s entirely digital. With approximately 250 films playing, it would be a disservice to the films to give a brief run-down of what’s good and what’s not, as so many festival reports do. Instead, these reports will be covering just one film a week, aiming to give each film the critical time and space it deserves.

Stories about men and their failed relationships with women make up a huge chunk of artistic output throughout recorded time. Occasionally, that results in a searingly painful work, but for the most part, these ideas are defined by mediocrity, inanity, inflated self-importance and maudlin crap, courtesy of a million sub-Woody Allen knock-offs, with the protagonist usually living in a cultural desert like New York, L.A. or London. Will Anderson’s Betty is at once both another entry into this ever-growing catalogue of works and a funny meta-parody of all the sub-genre’s greatest crimes.

The trouble with making a comedic short is that its quality is often defined by the punchline. Functionally, comedy shorts end up not too far removed from sketch comedy, a get-in and get-out run through an idea that leaves little to consider from an aesthetic or critical experience. That’s not a bad thing — the majority of shorts are made by early-career filmmakers, and Encounters is brimming with films that are aesthetic exercises, try-outs for bigger things, sketches that form part of a stylistic evolution. Betty, through the simplest of guises — bare-bones animation, a bit of music and a wry, haphazard director’s commentary — is an impressive feat of doing a lot with extremely little.

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In the broadest of terms, Betty tells the story of Bobby, an anthropomorphic bird who falls in love with the titular character, who then disappears, leaving Bobby on his own and on the verge of a breakdown. Throughout, Anderson is present in voiceover through a director’s commentary. 

Betty is full of little notes that point to the creator’s role in presenting a one-sided version of a relationship. Betty herself is mute, and all of her interactions with Bobby are dominated by his incessant talking. He also has a habit of attempting to dictate behaviour. The camera constantly jump cuts and snap zooms, suggesting a creator impatient with his creation. The simple animation (throughout many scenes, you can even the see the rigs that are used to control character movements) hones in on the feel of a work tossed off in a hurry as the creator tries to make sense of his own failed relationship through the medium of cinema.

The music by Richard Luke is that standard, vaguely emotive and swelling romantic music so often heard in the sad moments of a romance films (“smashed it”, says Anderson, and he’s quite right too), but everything has the feel of an ersatz emotion. Anderson admits to it as much when he stops the film halfway through and declares it to be “pathetic, manipulative nonsense” in his droll Scots accent. Betty then reverses on itself, as it becomes about Anderson musing on his own romantic failures and inability to produce a worthwhile artistic response.

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Anderson talks about his control freak nature, and how he builds harmful narratives into relationships, with his voice slightly cracking — it’s a great vocal performance, oscillating between mumbled observations and a sense of fear. There’s an irony in Anderson’s film; even if it’s a riposte to acres of men-in-failed-relationships films, it is still one of them, and Anderson’s own failings still come into play. The relationship in the first half of the film is constructed by the narrator, but so is the supposedly truthful one in the second half: the film can’t get away from its own mission statement. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as the best parodies and satires often work both as send-ups of the things they’re making fun of and great examples of those very same things — the mirror and the target becoming one. Betty doesn’t preach to the converted, because it does such a brilliant job of roping viewers into the same emotive, manipulative nonsense that it criticizes. Luke’s music is genuinely moving, and there’s a bizarre sadness to scenes of Bobby wandering around trying to find Betty. When Anderson cuts it short, you realise that you’ve been had by a smart director toying both with the audience and with himself.

The deliberate simplicity and choppiness of the animation plays back into that. It’s the feel of something done quickly and obsessively, as if trying desperately to avoid falling into a black pit of romantic despair but resulting instead in falling further down that rabbit hole. It culminates in a central scene where Bobby, before realising that Betty has left, tries to get some butter from the table, but Anderson makes it disappear from view before he gets there. Bobby then proceeds to wander around the kitchen repeatedly asking “Where’s the butter, Betty?”

The scene was supposedly the first one in the film, and there was a five-hour livestream of it too. Anderson shouldn’t be faulted for his commitment to “the bit.” It is a deeply stupid scene in the best possible way — the kind of stupidity that arises from creative despair and boredom, the sense of having to do something, anything, to keep from going crazy. There’s a cheaply animated clown-like lovebird, desperately made to scrabble about for butter because his creator deigned it to be so in a film about how masculine notions of control tip over into one-sided relationship narratives. I wouldn’t be surprised if more artistic works like Betty emerge in the months to come, as lockdown pushes people’s boredom to the limits. However, whether these people release these works is another matter. Much like the narratives it’s parodying, Betty has nothing particularly insightful to say, and it’s fully aware of it — that’s why its such a great send-up. Marriage Story this is not, but it is probably better.

Fedor Tot (@redrightman) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specialising in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.