Vieux Beau
2026 · 2m
Directed by Clément Trunde
Genres: dark comedy, drama, satire
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
In a deserted swimming pool, a nostalgic lifeguard recounts to camera his golden adolescence and his past cruelties, in an ironic and poignant mockumentary about vanity, the passage of time, and regret.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A lifeguard confessional in an empty pool sounds like the setup for something genuinely perverse, but Trunde plays it disappointingly straight—the mockumentary form is there, the regret is real, and the irony lands exactly where you'd expect it to, which means it lands nowhere.
Trunde locates himself squarely in the lineage of the formal essay-film and the melancholic portrait, where the static framing of the pool becomes both stage and ruin; the two-minute constraint forces a precision of editing and tonal control that most features fail to achieve.
The decision to keep the lifeguard's body partially out of frame—anchored by his voice while the empty pool absorbs the visual weight—is what transforms a premise about vanity into something that actually stings; it's a single compositional choice that does all the thematic work.