Le Geste final
2019 · 25m · France
Directed by Olivier Cazin
Genres: dark comedy, experimental, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
On a construction site that never finishes, a foreman dreads the worst as they await a delivery of Zyrtec-blue pigment and metaphysical events tip the closed world into absurd chaos.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A construction site that never finishes waiting for Zyrtec-blue pigment—yes, the allergy medicine—as a foreman watches metaphysics eat his closed world alive? This is exactly the kind of premise that makes you distrust your own reading comprehension, and Cazin leans *into* that discomfort rather than winking at you. Most scouts would pass on the sheer weird audacity; Felix is already clearing shelf space.
Cazin's 25 minutes sit at the intersection of Buñuel's bureaucratic absurdism and contemporary European experimental practice, with the formal patience to let surrealism emerge from deadpan restraint rather than spectacle. The specificity of the pigment—a brand name, not abstraction—grounds the metaphysical incursion in a kind of postmodern realism that rewards sustained attention.
The film's entire alchemy lives in the decision to shoot the unfinished site in flat, quotidian light while the script bleeds toward the impossible: that tonal refusal to signal when we've crossed into chaos is what makes the absurdity land like a punch rather than a joke. One choice—visual consistency despite narrative rupture—and suddenly a modest premise becomes something unforgettable.