A World Without Women

A small town on the Picardy coast. Sylvain lives there, manages holiday lets and does very little. At the end of the summer a mother and daughter move into one of the houses for a week. Sylvain and his friend Gilles show them the town. Across that week nothing quite happens between the four of them, and that nothing is the whole film. Guillaume Brac writes and directs. Vincent Macaigne plays Sylvain and Laurent Papot plays Gilles. It runs fifty eight minutes, a medium length film. The idea is the missed opportunity. Sylvain does not say what he feels, does not act, and at the end of the week everything stands as it was. Brac does not construct that as tragedy; he presents it as the town's own tempo. Macaigne's character established a type of its own in French cinema: dishevelled, talkative, incompetent, and not trying to be likeable. This is one of the early instances of it. The location is the centre. Coastal towns at the end of a season, the emptying beach and the closing shops carry the entire feeling. Brac became known afterwards for Tonnerre and Un été comme ça; this is among his first works. Who it is for: viewers who like French independent cinema and films built on atmosphere rather than event. Who it is not for: genuinely nothing happens, the pace is slow despite the short length, and the film gives no conclusion.