Steve
2012 · 1m · France
Directed by Mathieu Auvray
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Steve was a happy small boy with a lisp, but his teen years bring complications: still small and lisping, now he is also fat, white all over, with a pink spot on his belly and scrawny arms.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A one-minute description of puberty as a body horror transformation—lisps and fat and pink spots catalogued like symptoms—is genuinely unsettling in a way most coming-of-age films are too reverent to touch, but the premise does more work than the film itself.
Auvray's restraint here echoes a lineage of essayistic portraiture in short form, though the deadpan inventory of physical traits risks collapsing into sketch rather than sustaining the melancholic register the piece seems to reach for.
That the film doesn't show us Steve—only describes him, lets language do the imaging—is the exact formal choice that makes a one-minute piece about bodily shame land with force; the absence forces the viewer to construct their own complicity in the looking.