Critics reviews

Manivel has a sly, understated control over this walk through the park, but there's more on his mind than the awkward courtship of two mumbling teens. When the girl shows the boy a photo on her phone, Manivel displays it onscreen so we can see what they're seeing. It's a brief, lo-fi interruption of the action, but also a small act signaling a sort of break. There's a growing energy between the two adolescents and beyond, and it comes to be the film's dominant force.

Modest in scope, yet not without its own peculiar ambition, Damien Manivel's Le parc is the kind of film that feels not just out of place in the current cinematic landscape, but out of time as well.

It's a film of extreme simplicity – or rather, in its establishing of a quiet, uncluttered space in which thought can breathe, it is one of those apparently simple films that produce an extraordinarily rich proliferation of meaning.

I admit I was feeling apprehensive about sitting through all of its 71 minutes early on; the acting is rough, and there are some technical red flags (the dialogue, for instance, sounds like it was recorded with the build-in mic on an iPhone) that screamed "Go get some sleep instead." There's a curious and assured rhythm to it, though, and Manivel exhibits a remarkable compositional sense, at times evoking Pedro Costa's recent work, so it didn't take long to sweep me into its spell.

All it takes is a girl, a guy and a touch of phantasmagoria to make for an intriguing contemporary romance in The Park... Manivel keeps us guessing until the very end about the verisimilitude of the proceedings, especially when a helpful security guard (Sessouma Sobere) slowly takes on another, more troubling role, leaving us to contemplate the danger of what may really just be an overstated case of the lovesick blues.