Triptyque
2026 · 2m
Directed by Axel Rognon
Genres: comedy, essay film, experimental
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
Zack has just bought a painting by Bartcass, a promising painter: for him it is the investment of the century, for Joël a ridiculous overpriced blue canvas, for Benoît an emotional revelation — while for the filmmaker the canvas is only a pretext to paint his own.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Rognon's trick—turning a painting into a mirror for three contradictory gazes, then stepping in front of it himself—is clever enough, but the absurdist setup feels more like a parlor game than genuine subversion; it's too aware of its own conceptual cleverness to actually unsettle anyone.
A formally precise essay-film that inherits from the lineage of Godard's image-interrogation and contemporary meta-cinema, where the triptych structure mirrors its own thesis—three readings of the same object, then the filmmaker's fourth—executed with the kind of considered economy that rewards close attention and repeat viewings.
The single masterstroke is the decision to let all three characters' interpretations exist as equally legitimate emotional truths, which reframes what could've been a glib conceptual exercise into something genuinely tender—a two-minute argument for why perspective, not the object itself, is the real artwork.