Déjeuner du Matin - a poem by Jacques Prévert (shortfilm)
2012 · 4m · France
Directed by Emmanuel Tenenbaum
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A cinematic staging of Jacques Prévert's poem 'Déjeuner du matin', in which a man wordlessly shares breakfast with the narrator and leaves without a glance.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Adapting a beloved French poem into film should be a trap—reverent, tasteful, dead on arrival—but Tenenbaum's refusal to 'illustrate' the text, letting silence and gesture do the work instead, is genuinely perverse in the best way.
Tenenbaum positions himself squarely in the essay-film tradition while honoring Prévert's tonal sophistication; the formal restraint—breakfast as ritual, the unstaged intimacy—proves that fidelity to a literary source needn't mean slavish visualization.
The entire film hinges on the single choice to play the departure in real time, unhurried and without melodrama, which transforms what could've been sentimental into something genuinely unbearable.