La Beauté - Lettre à M
2026 · 2m
Directed by Jean-baptiste Vial
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In two minutes, a man confronts the evidence that beauty cannot be kept: it strikes without warning, is endured, is lost — but never forgotten.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A two-minute essay on beauty's impermanence reads like the kind of refined melancholia everyone expects from French cinema—competent, yes, but Vial isn't interested in breaking the form or making us squirm, which means he's already lost me.
Vial locates himself precisely within the essay-film tradition—Kiarostami's meditation on presence, Bresson's economy of gesture—and executes with the kind of formal restraint that transforms a simple premise about loss into something genuinely indelible.
The restraint itself is the choice: in refusing to show us the beauty directly, letting it exist only as absence and memory in the frame, Vial makes two minutes feel like the only honest length this idea could possibly be.