Bonhomme
2023 · 5m · France
Directed by Pauline Pilarek, Laureline de Cremoux, Ariane Krief, Aurélie Marchand, Julie Olivieri, Clément Plays
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
Junior is a sensitive young teenager whose father, a gruff hunter, is determined to turn him into a man in his own image. After disappointing his father once again during target practice, Junior takes up the family rifle and heads off alone into the forest, ready to face up to his nature.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Six directors collaborating on a coming-of-age story sounds like committee-generated mush, but Bonhomme actually weaponizes that multiplicity—the film's tonal fractures and visual discontinuities feel deliberate, like watching masculinity splinter under collaborative scrutiny rather than resolve into neat catharsis.
This is a carefully composed interrogation of the bildungsroman tradition, where the forest becomes both the classical locus of self-discovery and a site of genuine moral ambiguity; the restraint in not resolving Junior's choice speaks to a formal sophistication that respects the viewer's discomfort.
The decisive move here is tonal—holding tenderness and dread in the same frame without collapsing into sentimentality, letting the camera linger on Junior's face in ways that make his vulnerability feel harder-won than any narrative beat could manage.