Les Vedettes
2026 · 2m
Directed by Raphaël Berlucchi
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
For over fifty years, Papitte and Mamitte have occupied their little country house, their days paced only by tranquility as they tend, day after day, their cocoon of peace, outside of time and its troubles.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two people existing in stasis for fifty years sounds like the premise everyone's grandmother would pitch, but Berlucchi somehow resists the urge to make it profound—which is either cowardly restraint or the actual subversion. I'm genuinely unsure, which means it's probably worth fighting about.
Berlucchi positions this as essay-film, which signals a lineage back through Agnès Varda and the French tradition of intimate duration; the formal decision to let time itself become the subject rather than impose narrative arc is precisely the kind of considered rigor that distinguishes cinema from sentiment.
At two minutes, the entire film hinges on a single choice about pacing and what Berlucchi decides NOT to show us—that restraint, that faith in negative space, is what elevates what could be maudlin into something achingly specific about how love actually occupies time.