Yulia
2009 · 6m · France
Directed by Antoine Arditti
Genres: comedy, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, surreal, whimsical
Torn from her kitchen, a young romantic woman is trapped in a room of five levers that trigger absurd events leading to her soulmate.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A kitchen-to-lever-room kidnapping that treats romantic destiny like a broken slot machine—the absurdist premise refuses to apologize for its own logic, and that refusal is exactly the point. Arditti's whimsy has teeth; this is the kind of surreal comedy that makes you uncomfortable before you realize you're laughing.
While the surrealist conceit is playful, the film's formal restraint—containment to one room, the mechanical repetition of lever-pulling—echoes a lineage of absurdist performance pieces, though it leans more toward sketch comedy than the rigor one might expect from that tradition.
The entire film pivots on one decision: treating the levers as comedic chance rather than narrative exposition, which lets Arditti compress what could be a feature-length mystery into six minutes of pure tonal control and lets the actor's micro-expressions do the real storytelling work.