Le ruban bleu
2026 · 2m
Directed by Romane Parc
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
Backstage at a beauty contest, the excitement is at its height; a presenter leads through the preparations — agitated technicians, stressed candidates, invested families — while behind the good-natured atmosphere and the competition's apparent lightness, a world where dreams and pressures intertwine gradually emerges.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Beauty pageant satire is pretty well-trodden territory, and Parc doesn't seem interested in upending the form — she's documenting the machine with a steady hand, which is fine, but where's the premise that makes me go *wait, what*?
Parc's restraint is her strength here: the editing rhythm mirrors the pageant's choreography of chaos and composure, and there's a real lineage to this kind of social observation — Wiseman's directness, maybe a touch of Kiarostami's attention to what happens in the margins of spectacle.
That two-minute constraint is where the film lives — Parc cuts between technicians, candidates, families in tight, purposeful sequences that let you feel the pressure building without a single explanatory line, and the choice to keep the presenter's voice warm while the subtext darkens is what makes this *work*.