Mouches
2026 · 2m
Directed by Pauline Grégoire
Genres: comedy, historical, romance
Tones: humorous, theatrical, whimsical
In the seventeenth century, suitors seduced with 'mouches', false beauty spots whose position signalled a mood; Agnès joins a speed-dating of marquises with her best friend — will she find love behind the participants' artifices?
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Speed-dating in a powdered wig isn't subversive enough to salvage what's fundamentally a rom-com premise dressed in velvet—Grégoire's got the whimsy down, but where's the sting?
Mouches understands its own history with real sophistication: the formal constraint of the beauty spot as a semiotic system becomes the film's organizing principle, turning a two-minute rom-com into a sharp meditation on artifice and courtship across centuries.
The genius move is making the mouches placement itself the punchline and narrative device—every cut to a different mark on a different face does the character work without exposition, letting two minutes do the work of a feature's worth of setup.