PARFAITE

The scouts

Beauty pageant coming-of-age is the opposite of subversive territory—unless Grandperret and Moreau are doing something genuinely weird with it, which the description doesn't suggest, so I'm out.

Two minutes is a constraint that demands formal precision; if this sits in the lineage of contemplative European short cinema, the editing and sound design will tell us whether it earns its tenderness or just performs it.

The decision to keep a beauty pageant story tender and contemplative rather than critical or ironic—and to make that tonal choice *work* in 120 seconds—is exactly the kind of counterintuitive restraint that separates craft from sentiment.