La beauté (n.f)
2026 · 2m
Directed by Mélody Mota
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
Mélody asks the women who inspire her what beauty is — whether a single definition is possible, and whether beauty really exists.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A two-minute essay film asking *what is beauty* risks collapsing into Hallmark greeting-card territory, but Mota's refusal to synthesize an answer—letting contradiction and silence do the work—is genuinely subversive in how it weaponizes sincerity against itself.
Mota situates herself in the lineage of feminist essay cinema and the Godardian interrogation of philosophical concepts, using the documentary interview as a formal constraint that generates real rigor: the film's power lives in what remains unresolved, a restraint that feels learned and deliberate.
The decisive move is Mota's choice to let the women's answers *contradict each other* without editorial smoothing—that formal honesty, the refusal to curate consensus from the interviews, is what transforms a simple conceptual premise into something that actually breathes.