Three friends — Pascale Bodet, Bojena Horackova, and Anne Benhaïem — are chatting about their film projects at a café terrace. Anne describes to them the film we’re about to see: “Two limping sixty-somethings, a man and a woman, bump into each other in the street and fall over.” Like something out of a Russian doll, her words — and she herself, as a character — come to life on screen at that very moment. What follows is a film that is wistfully Chaplinesque, punctuated by the inscrutable smile of Anne Benhaïem (the slug) and her exchanges with her aristocratic, wavering partner (the snail). A film made up of images that speak — the kind that cinema offers us less and less often: the precise caress of bare feet, two seventeenth-century fruit stones (peach and cherry), or the uneven fate — Pascale: “I’m afraid you’re going to say what comes next” — of a Lubitsch-style pyjama for two. (Manuel Asín)
