Les Pécheresses
2014 · 17m · Belgium
Directed by Gerlando Infuso
Genres: animation, dark comedy, fantasy
Three women in three eras — Eve, Bluebeard's last wife, and a 1930s New York cabaret dancer — defy a forbidden act and suffer the violent wrath of a male figure.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Three women across mythic time all getting the same brutal punishment for the same crime—it's a genuinely twisted premise that could've been preachy, but Infuso leans into the absurdity of it, letting the surrealism do the moralizing. Dark comedy that actually earns its darkness.
Infuso constructs a formal tripartite argument about transgression and male violence by placing these narratives in dialogue across animation styles and temporal registers; the film's rigor lies in how its mythic, literary, and modernist frameworks speak to each other without collapsing into one another. This is the kind of short that demands multiple viewings to parse its formal ambitions.
The decision to animate three distinct eras in a unified visual language—rather than code-switching styles—forces the viewer to feel the thematic repetition in their bones; it's a structural choice that turns what could've been illustrative into something genuinely disorienting and haunting.
Reviews
« Les Pécheresses », court-métrage d'animation en volume, a reçu la Mention Spéciale Animation du 23ème festival Le court en dit long. Récompensé à Annecy dès son premier film (« Margot », 2007, Prix du Jury Junior), Gerlando Infuso a poursuivi dans la voie d'un gothique féminin, et peut-être même f