Corps en toile
2026 · 2m
Directed by Maël Deleplanque
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, sensual, tender
In a night studio lit by candles, a painter glides his brush over his canvas and brings his model's forms to life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of a guy painting by candlelight sounds like the definition of precious, but Deleplanque's somehow made the inverse—there's a refusal to sentimentalize the act, a almost austere sensuality that actively resists the easy romance of the premise.
This sits firmly in a lineage of studio films that interrogate the artist-model relationship through purely visual means—Vigo, perhaps early Bresson—and the formal precision of Deleplanque's framing and the deliberate pacing suggest a filmmaker acutely aware of that tradition and working within its constraints with real intention.
The decision to keep the model mostly still, letting the camera and light do the animation rather than the body, transforms what could've been intimate into something genuinely eerie and meditative—it's that single restraint that makes the whole thing work.