Clac!
2017 · 20m · France
Directed by Fabien Ara
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic, tense
A French family gathers for dinner at a Chinese restaurant when the mother calmly announces she intends to end her life that night, sending the table — and her three grown daughters — into a controlled emotional unraveling.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most films treat suicide as a third-act tragedy; Ara announces it over appetizers and then *keeps the camera on the family's forced smalltalk*, mining something genuinely unsettling from the gap between social ritual and catastrophe. It's audacious enough that it shouldn't work, and it does.
The restraint here feels descended from a specific lineage of Haneke and Koreeda—the refusal to score emotional beats, the attention to what remains unsaid while someone orders spring rolls—positioning the mundane restaurant setting as the film's true formal argument about how we contain grief.
The entire film hinges on a single directorial choice: letting scenes breathe past their breaking point, holding on uncomfortable silences between the announcement and the next line of dialogue, which transforms what could be maudlin into something almost unbearably alive.
Reviews
Dark comedy at its finest — a marvelous ensemble performance with a heartbreaking ending.
Very French, with strong performances and writing that delivers genuine laughs alongside the ache.
Festivals
- Nouveaux Cinemas Festival 2017, Best Screenplay Award
- Transilvania Shorts 2018, Best Student Film
- Black Sea Film Festival 2018
- Bucharest Short Film Festival 2018
- European Film Awards 2018, Nominee