Le Thème
2026 · 2m
Directed by Benoit Mattei
Genres: comedy, essay film
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, humorous
Two friends, pressed for time, have one week to make a short film on the imposed theme of 'beauty'; between humour and bad faith, ideas fly — women, the world, nature, the sea, love, the sky — until one idea imposes itself as obvious.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a film *about* making a film about beauty, which sounds like the kind of meta navel-gazing that usually makes me want to scream—except Mattei actually subverts the whole exercise by letting the characters fail at sincerity, which is genuinely funny in a way that doesn't feel accidental.
The essay-film tradition from Marker through contemporary work finds a witty mirror here: Mattei treats the creative constraint not as burden but as formal premise, and the rhythmic cycling through ideas—women, nature, love—echoes the dialectical structure of essay cinema while maintaining the lightness of a two-minute comedy.
The pivot point is that final moment when one idea 'imposes itself as obvious'—Mattei's decision to make the ending about inevitability rather than inspiration rescues what could've been a sketch into something that actually means something about how creativity works under pressure.