La Barbe
2026 · 2m
Directed by Laodicée Hazim
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, romance
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, theatrical
At a perfectly orchestrated candlelit dinner, the spruce Alfredine and dashing Alfred's seduction reaches its peak thanks to hair-perfect preparation — until the well-oiled machinery jams, races and reveals decidedly shaky foundations.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A two-minute romance that *looks* like a Vogue advertisement before it deliberately derails into absurdist chaos — Hazim's refusal to let the seduction play straight, instead exposing the theatrical machinery underneath, is exactly the kind of subversive genre-bending that makes consensus critics uncomfortable.
Hazim demonstrates considerable formal control in the escalation from romantic mise-en-scène to darkly comic collapse, with each visual and tonal beat precisely calibrated; the film understands its debt to theatrical comedy traditions while executing its own measured dismantling of those conventions.
The entire film pivots on a single decision — the moment the performance cracks and the characters' fastidiousness becomes grotesque rather than aspirational — and that one tonal flip, executed through restraint rather than obviousness, transforms what could've been a sketch into something genuinely unsettling.