Stiletto

The scouts

A 46-minute meditation on stilettos sounds like the safest, most expected art-film move possible—and yet Leroux somehow uses the constraint to interrogate desire itself without winking, which is genuinely rare; she's made the boring premise interesting by refusing to undercut it.

Leroux positions the high heel within a rigorous lineage of object-focused cinema—Marker, Farocki, the essay tradition—and the film's formal restraint in letting historians, makers, and doctors speak without editorializing places it squarely in the lineage of cinema of ideas; the sensuality emerges from rigor, not the reverse.

The decision to intercut shoemaking craft footage with theoretical discourse could have flattened into mere illustration, but Leroux's choice to let the hammer-and-nail sequences breathe—to trust the viewer's eye over narration—transforms a conceptual essay into something tactile and real.