La Rage
2018 · 4m · Francia
Directed by Alice Saey
Genres: drama, historical, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
During the First World War, nineteen-year-old deserter sailor Maï crosses paths with sixteen-year-old Anna, a young widow who has just lost her husband in the trenches, and together they slowly revive a desire for freedom.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A WWI romance about desertion and grief—fine premise, but Saey plays it straight, all melancholy and tender reverence. Where's the formal risk, the weird angle that makes you reconsider what this story *could* be?
Saey positions this small intimacy against the machinery of war with real compositional intelligence; the film knows exactly what it owes to the tradition of wartime cinema and chooses to whisper instead of declaim.
Four minutes to resurrect two people from trauma, and Saey does it through a single recurring gesture—the way touch is offered, hesitant, then accepted—that carries the entire emotional architecture of the piece.