Vanité contemporaine
2026 · 2m
Directed by Adélaïde Weiller-Bastide
Genres: dark comedy, drama, satire
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, provocative
Émilie, twenty, gets ready for a photo shoot under the watchful eye of her boyfriend Victor, who subtly influences her choice of dress; lighthearted, she leaves the apartment and is brutally struck down by a car — and her dress reappears framed in an art gallery, admired for its beauty and emptied of its violence.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Weiller-Bastide commits the kind of formal cruelty that makes consensus audiences uncomfortable—she kills her protagonist casually, then watches the world aestheticize the evidence. It's a premise that should feel gimmicky but lands as genuinely subversive precisely because she refuses to wink at it.
The film's architecture is deliberate: the domestic control in the opening mirrors the institutional appropriation of the dress in the gallery, creating a formal argument about objectification that sits comfortably within a lineage of satirical cinema on beauty and complicity.
The decision to let the dress become the protagonist—to cut away from Émilie's body entirely and frame the garment as the film's central character—is a single, elegant choice that transforms what could have been heavy-handed social commentary into something genuinely haunting and precise.