La plus belle
2026 · 2m
Directed by Suzon Jourdan
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, satire
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, tender
A village girl propelled into a beauty contest discovers that the world that fascinates her is exactly the one she must escape.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Beauty pageant coming-of-age sounds like every Sundance also-ran, but Jourdan flips the script into something genuinely unsettling—the fascination and the escape are the same trap, which is the kind of paradox most filmmakers don't have the nerve to sit with.
A deliberate, formally composed study in the claustrophobia of desire; Jourdan's restraint in tone and frame—that tender-then-darkly-comic register—sits in a lineage of European coming-of-age cinema that knows ambivalence when it sees it.
Two minutes to collapse a character's entire relationship to aspiration, and Jourdan does it by holding the beauty and the suffocation in the same shot; that compositional choice—refusing to let us pick a side—is where the whole film lives.