In Praise Of …“The Collapse”
Or, “L’Effondrement” if you will, a 2019 series of French short films.
I’ve always harboured a secret love of French cinema, right back from the time when I was first exposed to it as a postgraduate student pretending to be hip and cool to the wide range of modern languages students we used to meet in the various bars around town.
What I always loved was the weirdly disconcerting camera angles, the characters that were just that little bit too close to the bits of you own character that you take great care to hide in polite company, and the beautiful dark nature of the stories that they tell.
Of course, I’m no expert, not by a long way, but I know what I like and that’s one of the reasons I do tend to hunt around on various streaming services, in this instance StudioCanal, for gems of French origin.
Usually I’d look for films I’d missed from the French New Wave, something by or related to Godard or Truffaut, or more recent films and series that are recommended in specific genres that I follow¹.
And I can only apologise profusely for the pretentiousness of the last sentence having re-read it several times and tried unsuccessfully to rephrase it several times.
This is when L’Effondrement hit me — it felt like someone had crept toward me in the darkness, followed me step…
