Je t'aime pour deux
2026 · 2m
Directed by Alexandre Sarovier
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
At the end of an ordinary day, Ambre and her daughter Éléna sit down to dinner. But a remark Éléna received at school tips the moment into an intimate exchange about absence, love, and what is passed on when someone is no longer there.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Two minutes of a mother and daughter eating dinner sounds like the kind of tasteful nothing that wins sympathy votes — except Sarovier trusts the unsaid so completely that the absence itself becomes the third person at the table, which is either profound or pretentious, and I'm genuinely not sure which.
A film that understands the Dardenne brothers' restraint and the European tradition of intimate family portraiture; the economy of gesture here is exacting, each beat calibrated to evoke rather than explain, which places it squarely in the lineage of post-Dogme sensibility.
The entire film hinges on Sarovier's decision to hold the camera on the daughter's face the moment *after* she speaks the line about absence — not reacting, just existing in that silence — and that single cut transforms a tender domestic scene into something about inherited grief that lands harder than any monologue could.