LE TEMPS D'UN RITUEL
2026 · 2m
Directed by Mathilde Genty, Emma Monlezun
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Every Sunday, Robin visits her mother, who has Alzheimer's; makeup has always been their moment of complicity, begun by her mother years earlier, and when chocolate on her lips recalls the ritual's origin, Robin becomes the guardian of their story - until a flash of lucidity gives her back her mother for an instant.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A two-minute Alzheimer's story about makeup and memory sounds like the kind of prestige-circuit tearjerker that makes everyone nod in unison — except the chocolate detail as a sensory trigger for narrative inversion is genuinely weird, and that flash of lucidity that hands agency back to the mother instead of centering the daughter's epiphany is the kind of structural move that makes you question what you expected to feel.
Genty and Monlezun situate this squarely in the contemporary essay-film tradition where ritual becomes form — the makeup application mirrors the film's own precise, repetitive editing — and the restraint with which they handle the moment of recognition places it in conversation with filmmakers like Chloé Zhao who understand that lucidity in dementia isn't redemption but interruption.
The decision to make the chocolate the hinge point — sensory memory triggering not sentimentality but a reversal of who holds the story — is the specific, economical choice that transforms what could be a greeting-card premise into something that actually earns its two minutes, and you feel it in how the film trusts the mother's face rather than the daughter's reaction.