PETIT MONSIEUR
2026 · 2m
Directed by Charlotte Bigeard, Déborah Chantob
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, satire
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, whimsical
It's the big day: Andrea, seven, looks for the ideal costume and rehearses his role, having noticed that to get by in life you must be pretty and polite — well-dressed gentlemen always win, like the little banker on the Monopoly box.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A seven-year-old mimicking capitalist archetypes is the setup everyone would expect to be cutesy — but Bigeard and Chantob let the satire curdle just enough to make you unsure if you're laughing or wincing, which is exactly when satire stops being safe.
The film's economy of gesture—a child's careful rehearsal, the Monopoly box as visual anchor—echoes a lineage of European coming-of-age shorts that use miniature social rituals to examine conformity, all executed with compositional restraint that trusts the premise.
The decision to let Andrea *rehearse* rather than simply perform—treating costume and politeness as a learned script he's workshopping—is the single choice that transforms what could be obvious social commentary into something genuinely unsettling about childhood and complicity.