La Nuit américaine d'Angélique
2013 · 7m · France
Directed by Joris Clerté, Pierre-Emmanuel Lyet
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
After discovering Truffaut's La Nuit américaine, young Angélique resolves to invent her own life and become a script supervisor, before slowly learning that cinema does not solve every problem.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a cute essay on cinema-as-salvation, but that's precisely the problem—the film knows its own argument too well, delivering the disillusionment beat like it's checking a box. The premise wants to subvert the myth of cinema fixing your life, yet the execution feels safe, almost reverent toward Truffaut in a way that undercuts any real bite.
A formally considered meditation on cinephilia and growing up that positions itself knowingly within the lineage of Truffaut's own self-reflexive cinema—the recursive gesture of a young animator discovering La Nuit américaine and then animating her own becomes the film's structural and thematic core, executed with deliberate restraint and tender attention to the limits of art.
The decision to animate Angélique's disenchantment rather than literalize it—letting the shift in drawing style and color temperature carry the emotional truth of her realization—is what makes this work, transforming what could be a straightforward coming-of-age into something genuinely felt through the hand-made medium itself.
Reviews
L'indicible s'exprime ici grâce à une animation minimaliste, un retour à l'une des premières projections, celle des ombres chinoises tout autant que par la présence de l'écran dans l'écran et par la belle voix off de Louise Bourgoin. Avec le film de Clerté et Lyet, le train a trouvé son phare.