Ce qu'il y a de beau
2026 · 2m
Directed by Yasmine Merabet
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Leila, a sad young woman, sits down on a park bench and at once becomes witness to events from a woman's life across several eras.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A melancholic woman sits on a bench and watches other women's lives unfold—it's the kind of premise that sounds like a greeting card until you realize Merabet is doing something genuinely strange with time and witnessing, something that refuses to resolve into easy catharsis.
Merabet's formal restraint here is remarkable: a two-minute architecture of stillness and layered temporality that echoes the structural rigour of Bresson or early Haneke, situating intimate female interiority within a lineage of meditative European cinema.
The film lives or dies on the decision to keep Leila almost motionless while the world moves through her—it's a single choice about what the camera privileges that transforms a thin premise into something about the weight of witness and loneliness that feels earned rather than sentimental.