Play
2011 · 9m · France
Directed by Jonathan Vinel
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Seated on a chair in a games room dense with metaphor, a young man recalls his childhood and the friends of his village's 1990 generation who are no longer alive.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Vinel's refusal to let you know what's real and what's memory-theater should be insufferable, but instead it's genuinely unsettling—he's made a coming-of-age film that actively resists the genre's need to *resolve* anything, and it's the better for it.
The games room as a mise-en-scène for mourning is formally exquisite—Vinel positions memory and loss within a controlled, almost museum-like space, channeling a lineage of essay films that treat personal history as spatial and architectural, not merely temporal.
The sound design is doing all the heavy lifting here: the way ambient childhood noises bleed into the present-tense monologue creates a single audiovisual gesture that makes the whole melancholy apparatus work without a single wasted frame.
Reviews
Construit de manière discontinue, « PLAY » s'intéresse aux garçons, aux filles, aux pyramides, aux Playmobil, aux sapins et aux explosions. Dans le film, un jeune homme assis sur une chaise dans une salle de jeux truffée de métaphores se souvient de son enfance et des enfants de son âge qui y ont participé mais qui sont ne sont plus aujourd'hui.