Deux Dollars
2017 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Emmanuel Tenenbaum
Genres: dark comedy, drama, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
An exemplary employee returning from a week of leave is summoned to a bizarre office meeting that lays bare her co-workers' strange new attitude toward her.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A workplace satire that actually *inverts* the genre's usual targets—instead of skewering the system, it turns the protagonist into the alien, the one who doesn't belong anymore after just a week away. It's genuinely unsettling in a way that makes you uncomfortable about which side you're supposed to be on, which is exactly the kind of premise that gets reflexively rejected until someone like Tenenbaum proves it was the only move all along.
Tenenbaum constructs the film's tension through precise mise-en-scène and restraint—the meeting room becomes a pressure chamber where every eyeline and pause carries weight—situating itself squarely in the lineage of Haneke and Costa-Gavras, though scaled to the intimate cruelty of the office rather than the state.
The entire film hinges on the actress's stillness while everyone else performs their strangeness around her—that choice to keep her largely reactive, almost bewildered, while the co-workers speak in synchronic bursts transforms what could've been a broad comedy bit into something genuinely disorienting and human on a ten-minute budget.
Reviews
In uncomfortable drama short Two Dollars (Deux Dollars) an exemplary employee returns to work only to discover that whilst things have changed for the better in her absence, she's most definitely not invited to the party.
Festivals
- Festival Regard 2019
- CortoKino: Unleashing Global Cinema 2017, Winner International Competition
- Vebron International Film Festival 2017, Special Jury Mention
- International Comedy Film Festival of Liège 2017, Best Script
- Vimeo Best of the Year 2019, Nominated, Best Comedy