It’s time to take a break from the kinds of social injustice movies covered in this column for the past few months and, instead, shift to more pleasant fodder, like a lovely grandmother with a salt and pepper collection. Meredith Moore’s “Margie Soudek’s Salt and Pepper Shakers” is the kind of Mother’s Day offering that goes down easy: full of charm, warmth and surprises, especially with all those big explosions. It may not be the deepest film covered here, but in the spirit of Mother’s Day, it feels like the right short film to write about. I also have a weakness for short docs about weird collections.
“Margie Soudek’s Salt and Pepper Shakers” is about two people: Margie Soudek and her granddaughter, Meredith Moore, who is making the film. Soudek is in her nineties and has a gigantic wall full of (what else?) salt and pepper shakers, an impressive collection she has been adding to for several decades. Moore, naturally, wants to interview her grandmother while she can about this accomplishment and to know why and how she started this hobby. Moore also happens to be a visual effects instructor and tasks her students to come up with visual effects to aid in the telling of this profile documentary. Why? I’m still not entirely sure, but it does help separate itself from other personal profile docs of this type.
Soudek seems willing to go along with it, even though she doesn’t quite know what her granddaughter is going for with the VFX gimmick. By the end, we’re left to wonder what the film is ultimately about. Moore has her answer, but prompts us to consider other answers. For me, it’s about compulsion. Not in a way that is meant to be investigative or to have us question what drives us to do what we do, but in a way that is generally acceptable and part of who we are. Soudek has a large collection, probably because she can’t help but purchase a set when she finds one that fills her with a positive feeling. Perhaps Moore cannot help but take simple video footage and add something fantastical into it, either for fun or for a challenge. (I tried for a Q&A with Moore, but never got a response.)
“Margie Soudek’s Salt and Pepper Shakers” reminded me of another short I wrote about here many years ago: Sol Friedman’s “Bacon and God’s Wrath,” about a filmmaker’s grandmother who, at the age of 90, was going to try bacon for the first time. Both of these films take simple interview footage of an elderly family member and use whatever tools they have as filmmakers and effects wizards and punctuate the final film with unpredictable visual flair, the likes of which could never have been imagined back when these women were the age of their grandchildren.
In the end, as Moore tries to answer her grandmother’s questions as to what this film is about, it’s really just a simple document about her and her grandmother and their compulsions that help make them who they are. That is reason enough to make it and reason enough for us to enjoy it.
