Vieille Branche

The scouts

A man about to piss on a tree gets verbally sparred with by the tree itself—it's the kind of stupid-smart premise that shouldn't work but absolutely does, and everyone else will sleep on it while it sits there being weirdly subversive and right.

The conceit risks collapsing into cheap anthropomorphism, but there's a formal clarity to the two-minute structure that suggests deliberate restraint; whether Cagniat sustains the surrealist register or lets it slip into easy whimsy will determine if this is craft or mere novelty.

The real trick here is probably in the vocal performance or the rhythm of the cutting—finding the exact moment where the tree stops being a gimmick and becomes genuinely uncanny, which is where a film this slight either transcends its budget or disappears entirely.