Quand je serai beau
2026 · 2m
Directed by Grégory Fischesser
Genres: biography, drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Twenty years after staging a video for his song "quand je serai beau je n'aurais plus peur de personne" ("when I am beautiful, I will fear no one"), a man brings the self he was face to face with the self he has become, between illusions and paradoxes.
Picked by Margot
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A guy literally confronts his younger self across two decades and it's *still* somehow more about the gap between intention and reality than about the gimmick—which is either restraint or cowardice, and I'm genuinely unsure which.
Twenty years of formal distance compressed into two minutes: Fischesser brackets the original video as archive, as ghost, treating the meeting between selves as a problem of temporality and representation rather than narrative catharsis—there's a real lineage here, from Marker to Akerman, of cinema as witness to time's paradoxes.
The decision to literally play both versions of himself—not as voiceover, not as memory, but as present bodies in the same frame—is what makes the melancholy land; it's the editing choice of staying *still* while that duality occupies the space that does the work.