Chat Noir
2019 · 12m
Directed by Joanna Cognard
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
On the night of 13 November 2015, Agathe and Pierre leave a Paris hospital with blood on their clothes and bruises on their faces. Back home amid sirens and rolling news, small lost gestures and a black cat bring them a little tenderness and comfort.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to make a 'humans endure tragedy together' film, and Cognard does it *competently*, which somehow makes it worse—there's nothing here that breaks the mold, just a studied melancholy that feels like it's checking boxes for festival consideration.
Cognard's restraint is the entire film: the refusal to dramatize the November 13 attacks, the way small domestic gestures (a cat, a bruise tended to) become the syntax of grief—this is formally precise work that understands how cinema *holds* rather than explains trauma.
The decision to keep the news reports muffled, almost abstract in the background while the camera stays locked on hands and forearms—that single spatial choice collapses the distance between public catastrophe and private shock in a way that justifies every quiet minute.
Reviews
Dans Chat noir, ce court-métrage poignant et émouvant de Joanna Cognard, ce n'est pas seulement ce soir-là, mais aussi la traduction de tous les autres. Puis ce chat noir, pourtant signe de malheur chez les superstitieux, qui ramène de la douceur et du confort.