Emilie Jolie
2026 · 2m
Directed by Pierre Danjou, Thomas Houziel
Genres: dark comedy, romance, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
Handsome Jean chains romantic dates and scores each girl against a conformity table built from a face collaged out of magazines, dreaming of the one who will pass 8 out of 10; one day he meets Emilie, who matches his ideal at last.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A two-minute indictment of romantic consumerism dressed as a love story—the genius is that Danjou and Houziel never wink at the audience, letting the collaged-magazine ideal become so grotesque it loops back into something genuinely unsettling. This is the kind of premise that makes you uncomfortable *and* laugh, which means it's probably saying something true that conventional romance would never dare.
The film operates within a lineage of satirical shorts that interrogate desire through formal constraint—the scoring table is a brilliant structural conceit that recalls the geometric cold of Godard or early Haneke—though the two-minute runtime occasionally shortchanges the tonal complexity the premise deserves.
The decision to build Jean's ideal from literal magazine fragments rather than showing his face is what makes this work: suddenly you're watching collage *as character*, and that single visual choice transforms a relationship comedy into a critique of manufactured identity that a bigger budget would have diluted.