La copie de Coralie
2008 · 22m · France
Directed by Nicolas Engel
Genres: comedy, drama, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, whimsical
Monsieur Conforme has run his 'Copie Conforme' reprography shop for thirty years, haunted by the memory of a woman who disappeared, until his young assistant Virginie plasters the town with a missing-person notice.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A shopkeeper haunted by a ghost? That's Truffaut-grade melancholy, not rebellion—Engel's playing it straight when the premise wants you to *feel* the weight of thirty years of routine, which is honest but too reverent for its own good.
Engel locates himself precisely in the French New Wave lineage—the missing woman becomes a Hitchcockian absence that structures memory and desire—and the film's restraint, its refusal to sentimentalize the assistant's intervention, marks a director thinking carefully about tone and narrative architecture.
The entire film hinges on Engel's choice to let Virginie's act of kindness (the missing-person notice) unfold as quiet disruption rather than redemptive drama, a tonal micro-decision that transforms a simple premise into something genuinely tender.
Reviews
Dans une atmosphère teintée de nostalgie, la reproduction devient un moyen efficace et concret de faire ressurgir le passé. Avec ce deuxième opus, le cinéaste nous livre une comédie chantée à l'accent grave et nostalgique, aux intonations naturelles et légères.