Le prix de la beauté
2026 · 2m
Directed by Alice Huet
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, provocative
Maria, a self-conscious schoolgirl, struggles not to give in to the beauty industry's dictates, but in a society that exploits young girls' insecurities, one ordinary day can tip everything over.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent PSA about beauty standards dressed up as a short film—exactly the kind of well-meaning premise that makes festival programmers feel virtuous while saying nothing we haven't heard a thousand times before.
Huet works in a lineage of feminist coming-of-age cinema with clear intention, though the two-minute runtime constrains the formal nuance this premise demands; the melancholic tone suggests deeper formal ambitions than the execution quite reaches.
The pivot point lives in a single moment—how Huet captures the exact beat when Maria's internal resistance collapses into compliance—and whether that's shot as a glance, a gesture, or a cut will determine if this is hollow or devastating.