The First Step
2014 · 20m · France
Directed by Aurélien Laplace
Genres: comedy, drama, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A dreary travel agent who spends every morning watching a beautiful young woman leave her building finally decides to act when news of his transfer forces his hand.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects this to be a creepy-stalker-gets-the-girl story, but Laplace refuses the obvious ending—there's a quiet refusal of romance-plot machinery that most filmmakers don't have the nerve for, and it's weirdly more unsettling than any twist.
A formally restrained study in longing that knows its debts to the French New Wave's treatment of quotidian desire; the composition of that morning ritual, repeated, builds into something almost Robians in its tender melancholy.
The whole film hinges on a single choice—keeping the camera steady on his face during the moment of decision, refusing to cut away or manipulate—and it's that discipline that transforms a small-scale character study into something that actually earns its emotional weight.