Belle Dune - "See You Later, Alligator..."

A short film by Léonard Sinclair, photographed by Maxime Beaud

Fiction / 18 min

Synopsis

The mutilated corpse of an English tourist is found in a tree, close to a small seaside resort in the north of France. Lieutenant Angela Jumcaucourt starts to investigate. Jérôme Montpied, a solitary young man from Belle Dune with few prospects, is profoundly changed by this macabre incident. It is as if he had found a new lease of life.

Comment

At Fort-Mahon Plage, the dunes are beautiful, but danger lurks. Thus begins episode 1 of season 1 in which Lieutenant Angela Jumcaucourt investigates the murder of a tourist whose mutilated body was found in a vacant lot.

Tumultuous seaside atmospheres, anonymous letters, ghostly Cadillac, everything here contributes to the suspense and strangeness. Leonard Sinclair, with his meticulous direction, plays with the codes. As a good forensic scientist, he dissects genre films to better lose us and surprise us. Like a Bruno Dumont who has watched too much David Lynch's films or a Tati lost in a Yves Klein's painting, Léonard has fun to blur the tracks, very sandy by the way. Each sequence is constructed to distill its share of micro-details like so many potential clues, until transforming the film into a role-playing game both playful and totally addictive. There is something hypnotic about following this endless quest and we want more.

In this seaside labyrinth, where nothing is ever totally stable, the fantastic is likely to appear at every slip of the whodunit. In the end, the only thing to watch out for is not so much the hypothetical episode 2 as the future of this talented young filmmaker.

Raphaël Sohier / Sound editor