04/02/2026 - Angelica Ruffier’s autobiographical documentary is a dream-like essay on obsessive desire as a compensatory remedy, and on loss and recovery in adult orphanhood

Losing one’s parents means losing a substantial part of one’s agency, but this loss itself also prompts a revisiting of memory that may bring us closer to our origins, to the truth about ourselves and, eventually, to maturity. For Angelica Ruffier, La Belle Année [+see also:
trailer
film profile]’s author and main character, documenting the immediate aftermath of her father’s death – including the house clearing that inevitably entails digging into the past – is a way to discover the previously invisible connecting thread between a forgotten obsession and suppressed trauma, a finding that explains the nature of her adolescent desire.

“Forgetfulness is a survival strategy” is a central sentence in the film, going hand in hand with its motto in the initial frame, Simone de Beauvoir’s phrase, “Earth would be a dull place if I had nobody to admire.” Following this line of thought, La Belle Année, currently competing for the Tiger Award at International Film Festival Rotterdam, traces an admiration that embellishes its object of affection to the point of delusion – so much so that the grey tones of reality take on brighter nuances.

This is literally how the screen contrast is created between the tedious clearing-out process taking place in the French home of a father whom Angelica and her brother Tom had barely known, and the images that surface as memories, triggered by a school diary found among the clutter. It bears witness to her secret infatuation with the elegant and enigmatic history teacher Miss B, visions of whom appear in vivid colours behind hazy filters, in contrast to the somewhat rougher cinéma vérité aesthetic of the footage capturing the present. The father had uncontrolled bursts of anger and violence, so one summer, the mother took the children to Sweden for a holiday, and they never came back. The act of burying painful memories of a sad home swept aside the feelings attached to this obsession, but now, upon recovering the diary, Angelica decides to close the chapter by meeting Miss B.

Conceived between Sweden and France as an extension of Ruffier’s own personality, and self-proclaimed as autofiction, La Belle Année progresses with the dense, inward emotional heft of Scandinavian introverted love, echoing Dag Johan Haugerud’s Dreams [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Dag Johan Haugerud
film profile], for example, while also drifting into the poetic reverie of Éric Rohmer’s films and cultural references, typical of French cinema in general. However, the uneven form, perhaps defined by personal hesitations, and the overly literal presence of the director-protagonist dilute the film’s supposedly enchanting fictional effect, leaving viewers within the realm of immediate, everyday documentary reality for too long. Against a backdrop of so many self-explorative films – be they fiction or documentary – La Belle Année aims to be more than autotherapy, yet it does not go far enough to truly live up to its ambitions and stand out. It remains little more than a confessional cinematic journey about a turning point in one’s life, identical to similar works we have seen before.

La Belle Année was produced by Sweden’s MDEMC and co-produced by Norway’s Aldeles. Odd Slice Films oversees its international sales.