Pétage
2017 · 10m · France
Directed by Greg Tudéla
Genres: comedy, crime, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
Freshly fired, Michel decides to rob the bar he goes to every day — but nothing goes as planned.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A bar robbery that actively *refuses* to be a heist film—instead it's a ten-minute study in how the most mundane, terrible plans collapse the moment they meet reality. This is the kind of absurdist dark comedy that makes you laugh at the wrongness of it, not the joke setup.
Tudéla locates *Pétage* in a lineage of French absurdist cinema—Tati-adjacent in its faith that comedy emerges from behavioral minutiae rather than plot—with editing that lets silences and failed momentum do the formal work.
The film's entire architecture rests on one deceptively simple choice: treating the botched robbery with the same mundane, patient framing as the daily bar ritual, so the disaster feels less like a punchline and more like an extension of Michel's ordinary exhaustion.