L'une pour l'être
2026 · 2m
Directed by Nino Arnaud
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
When the melancholy of a painful past resurfaces, Bérangère comes face to face with her old age — and with her youth.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of a woman staring at her own timeline—it's the kind of formally restrained premise that could bore you to tears, but Arnaud's refusal to sentimentalize the confrontation between youth and age actually lands harder than any plot twist could.
A deceptively simple formal problem solved with precision: how to stage the simultaneity of past and present without resorting to montage or voice-over, and L'une pour l'être finds its answer in duration and framing—the kind of considered restraint that recalls the contemplative lineage of Haneke and Koreeda.
The entire film pivots on a single spatial or temporal decision—whether Bérangère is literally seeing her younger self or confronting a mirror of memory—and that ambiguity is held with such control that it becomes the film's substance rather than its mystery.