LA BEAUTÉ
2026 · 2m
Directed by Emilie Gutierrez
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Two friends reach the last room of an art gallery; before the final work, their gazes diverge - one launches into a philosophical attempt to define beauty, the other stands frozen, his gaze closed to any new form of it.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two people looking at art and having completely different internal experiences—sure, that's structurally interesting, but the film leans so hard into tasteful melancholy that it forgets to actually *disturb* you; it's the kind of essay-film restraint that feels like self-satisfaction masquerading as depth.
Gutierrez finds formal precision in a deceptively simple premise: the divergence of two gazes becomes a meditation on how beauty functions as both philosophical proposition and embodied refusal, and that tension lives entirely in the editing and spatial relationship between the figures—this is the kind of technically considered two-minute work that lingers in the conversation.
The choice to keep one figure's face and gaze deliberately *closed* while the other performs philosophy—that single decision does all the emotional and thematic work, transforming what could've been a clever concept into something genuinely aching about how we encounter art differently.