In the French film A World Without Women (Un monde sans femmes), Vincent Macaigne plays a lovable loser who manages holiday rentals in a northern French beach town. He is amiable and good-hearted, but lonely and painfully socially inept. A good timing single mom brings her college age daughter for a week on the beach and teases him out of his protective shell and into a position of maximum vulnerability.
Macaigne’s characterization is outstanding. We really care for him and don’t want him to get hurt. But Macaigne brilliantly employs little touches to illustrate his character’s utter lack of savoir-faire. For example, at one point he and the mom are leaning shoulder to shoulder against a fence. She has her arms crossed, and she’s leading him on. He grasps her her nearest hand with his nearest hand. But since he’s now holding her left hand with his left, he has pinned her left arm awkwardly across her body like a pretzel, which drains all of the sexual spark out of the situation. And he can’t put his arm around her because he’s already using that arm to hold her hand. It’s such a simple action, yet so meaningful.
Laure Calamy is also very good as the fortyish gal who dresses too young and flirts with every available man, leaving male carnage in her wake.
Writer-director Guillaume Brac shows a real command of characters and dialogue in this film. I’m looking forward to his first feature. A World Without Women is only 56 minutes long, and plays with Brac’s 24 minute Stranded, which also stars Macaigne as essentially the same character The two films played together in Paris to surprising popularity. Fortunately, Brac decided not to bloat the two screenplays into two bad 90-minute features. Good for him.
I saw both Stranded and A World Without Women at the San Francisco Film Society’s French Cinema Now series. A World Without Women is not available now on any platform (DVD, Stream, VOD) that I can find, but when it is, I’ll make it a Stream of the Week. This trailer is in French without subtitles.