Le siècle des siècles
2018 · 2m · Francia
Directed by Arthur Sevestre, Chloé Forestier, Rémy Chanfreau
Genres: drama, fantasy, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
At the hour of the century of centuries, the sky burns as women and men slowly disappear. A couple attends the last spectacle offered by the stars before vanishing.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of apocalyptic soft-focus romance is exactly the kind of precious, self-serious end-times poetry that usually makes me roll my eyes—except Sevestre and Forestier actually commit to the bit with enough formal control that it stops being parody and becomes genuinely eerie.
The film's restraint—its refusal to show the disappearance directly, its reliance on negative space and the couple's composed witness—places it squarely in a lineage of contemplative sci-fi that prizes suggestion over spectacle, executed with the kind of frame discipline and sound design that rewards close attention.
What lifts this above melancholic wallpaper is the decision to keep the couple static while the world unmakes itself around them; that compositional choice—making inaction the most active thing in the frame—transforms a simple premise into something genuinely unsettling.