Belle, et puis ?
2026 · 2m
Directed by Elodie Merlier
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, dark
Through the eyes of a woman and of a little girl, this film traces how the injunction to be beautiful, taught from childhood as a condition of existence, becomes an invisible violence in adulthood.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The essay-film-as-indictment premise is solid, but it's also exactly what you'd expect a film about beauty-as-violence to do—I need to see Merlier actually *break* the form, not just ride it.
Merlier's formal restraint here feels earned: the dual perspective of woman and child isn't just thematic, it's structural—a considered argument about intergenerational conditioning that sitates itself in the lineage of feminist essay cinema with real rigor.
Two minutes to split a consciousness across generations is cramped, but that constraint forces Merlier into a single indelible visual or sonic choice—I need to see what she picked to make that doubling land.