LA RÉVÉRENCE

The scouts

Two minutes of a guy imagining the perfect birthday is basically a Hallmark premise dressed up in French — the kind of tender sincerity that makes my skin crawl, and I suspect Boutin knows exactly how treacly it could be, which is the only thing keeping me from dismissing it entirely.

Boutin positions this in a delicate lineage of intimate portraiture and the poetic imagination — there's something of Koreeda's spatial restraint here, a deliberate choice to let tenderness breathe without sentiment, and the formal discipline required to sustain that for two minutes is considerable.

The entire film pivots on whatever Boutin chose to show versus conceal in Paul's imagining — that single decision about how much of the fantasy materializes, how the camera treats the threshold between thought and reality, is what separates this from greeting-card schmaltz into something that actually earns its vulnerability.