At the Other End of the Table
2019 · 3m · France
Directed by Lise Rémon
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A man tries to talk to a woman who seems unreachable even though she sits right across the table — a table that promises connection but builds distance.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The table-as-metaphor thing is almost too on-the-nose for me, but Rémon actually commits to the surreal left turn instead of just making a relationship drama — she's treating the furniture like a character with its own agenda, which is weird enough to work.
Rémon positions herself in a lineage of spatial cinema — Bresson's geometry, Haneke's interiors — where the mise-en-scène does the emotional work; the table becomes a formal barrier that *is* the conversation, and the restraint in the blocking is what makes the distance legible.
The decision to hold the camera static while the table lengthens or the distance shifts without cutting — there's one moment where she's suddenly impossibly far — that single choice of *how* to show unreachability instead of telling it is everything here.