Au revoir Jérôme!
2021 · 8m · France
Directed by Chloé Farr, Gabrielle Selnet, Adam Sillard
Genres: animation, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, surreal, whimsical
Jérôme wanders a surreal, illogical Heaven searching for Maryline, only to learn she prefers to spend the afterlife alone.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A romance that collapses into its own punchline—Jérôme chases his dead lover through a bureaucratic fever dream only to get rejected by her in the afterlife. It's the kind of premise that makes you laugh at the audacity of it, and it doesn't blink.
The film sits confidently in a lineage of absurdist animation, with careful attention to the logic of its illogical space; the surreal geography and tonal consistency suggest filmmakers aware of their predecessors—Svankmajer, maybe some early Plympton.
What clinches this is the decision to make the Heaven itself the antagonist—not through spectacle but through the quiet wrongness of each interaction, a spatial design that does more with animation's lean palette than most films do with unlimited budget.
Reviews
Jérôme's and Maryline's Heaven is like no other: far from idyllic, it is actually exciting. The same could be said for Chloé Farr's, Gabrielle Selnet's and Adam Sillard's little movie.