FRENCH LESSONS

There’s something quietly disarming about "French Lessons," a short that understands exactly how much can be said in a handful of minutes when you trust behaviour over exposition. On paper, it’s almost nothing: two men, a conversation, a coffee-shop orbiting Los Angeles ambition, the faint hum of Cannes in the distance. But the film isn’t interested in the destination. It’s interested in the moment before movement, that uncomfortable pause where intention curdles into performance and everyone involved pretends they’re not negotiating for something.

What struck me most is how effortlessly the film captures the emotional grammar of industry conversation. Not the loud, caricatured version, but the real one — glances that linger half a beat too long, sentences designed to sound casual while hiding a thesis, politeness sharpened into a kind of soft power. Kyle Garrett Greenberg’s executive persona is all restraint and calibration, a man who understands that withholding is often louder than speaking. 

Opposite him, Arran Shearing’s filmmaker carries that familiar, almost painful energy of wanting to be taken seriously without wanting to appear like he wants it too much. Their exchange becomes a delicate imbalance, not played for melodrama, but for recognition. You’ve seen this dance before, even if you’ve never stepped onto a festival carpet.

There’s a sly intelligence to how French Lessons toys with ideas of authenticity. It wears the label of cinéma vérité like a knowing grin, constantly nudging the audience to ask what’s real and what’s rehearsed. The bilingual flourishes aren’t just jokes; they feel like a commentary on how prestige is often performed rather than earned, how language, culture, and taste can become accessories in the same way a lanyard or a festival badge does. Los Angeles, in this context, becomes less a place and more a mindset — a city where sincerity and strategy are perpetually sharing the same sentence.

What I admire most is the film’s restraint. At seven minutes, it refuses the temptation to explain itself or underline its ideas. It trusts the viewer to sit with the unease, to recognise the quiet absurdity of an industry where even the simplest human interaction can feel transactional. There’s humour here, but it’s the kind that comes from recognition rather than punchlines. By the time it ends, you’re left thinking not about what was said, but about what wasn’t — the pauses, the power shifts, the small calculations that define so much of creative life.

"French Lessons" doesn’t offer answers, and it doesn’t pretend to. Instead, it holds up a mirror, slightly tilted, and lets the reflection speak for itself. It’s a film about cinema that understands the strangest truth of all: that the business surrounding art is often far more revealing than the art people claim to be protecting. In capturing that contradiction with such economy and warmth, Greenberg and Maguire prove that sometimes the sharpest observations arrive quietly, smiling, and speaking just enough French to make you wonder who it’s really for.