Sam Davis's short film The Singers, which tied for the Academy Award for best live action short last year, adapts an 1852 Turgenev short story of the same name — and it does so with amateur singers discovered on social media.

The premise is simple. A bartender at a quiet, locals-only bar offers $100 and free drinks to the bar's best singer. The competition becomes a tender and funny musical showcase, with each character receiving a revealing moment in the spotlight. The film culminates in what viewers have greeted with a huge laugh as the credits roll.

Davis, a seasoned documentarian, wanted to make "a love letter to the underdog," and cast his film accordingly: undiscovered talents who have gone viral once or twice, or had a shot on some reality singing show. Working without a traditional script, he let the cast improvise and bring themselves to their roles. One actor kept trying to sneak beers on set; it became part of the film. Another shared that he lost his wife; this too became part of the film.

All performances were recorded in the bar and shot on 35 mm, giving the film a warm and intimate texture. The tie it earned at the Oscars is one of only seven in Academy history.

The film transforms a familiar masculine impulse — turning singing into a bar competition — into something genuinely vulnerable. Like Turgenev's story, it works as a container for different characters, allowing the audience to draw its own constellations between the story's points.

A similar dynamic animates Buddhadeva Bose's 1951 novella My Kind of Girl, a series of stories about youth and ill-fated love told by four delayed travelers. The men — a contractor, a bureaucrat, a writer and a doctor, a Chaucerian cross section — are brought together on a cold night in a train station's waiting room. A young couple passes them by, inspiring the men to trade memories of early romance.

Bose published the novella soon after Partition and a year after the Indian Constitution went into effect. But the past the men recall would have been the 1920s or '30s, when the British were still colonizing the region, resistance was gaining strength, and cultural mores were shifting in India and around the globe.

The same insecure masculinity present in Turgenev and in Davis's The Singers runs through the book, as these men find themselves in the unknowns of a national transition. Bose formally dramatizes the moment: middle-class professionals waiting for a modern engine to take them forward.

The stories of love are the heart of the book, and each is a protracted sigh full of longing. As one of the men asks: "Is the memory of happiness that has passed, happy or sad?" The answer seems to be both. These are not meet-cutes. The four romances are bittersweet — marked by melancholy, ending too soon, or never getting a chance to begin.

Yet there is always warmth in the telling, the unmistakable blush of first love, and the sharing affects both teller and audience. The book's finest moments come when Bose returns to the waiting room after a story concludes, as the men sit together, the story lingering around them like the smoke of an extinguished cigarette.

Each story carries a moment of small grief: the unrealized potential of a connection that never formed, because none of these men ever truly knew the person they pined for. "The girl of our dreams, who lives in our heart, [he] wanted to see her for one time as a real person—that is all that is real, all that matters, nothing else does."

It is a recognizable regret, part of reckoning with time that has passed — the feeling that anything was possible meeting the cold, granite reality of an ending, as final as summer becoming fall.