Guillaume Brac's Un monde sans femmes | A World without Women (2012)

This medium-length film takes place in Ault on the north coast, where a young-looking Patricia (Laure Calamy) and her late teenaged daughter Juliette (Constance Rousseau) go for a week's summer holiday, where the painfully shy middle-aged Sylvain (Vincent Macaigne) hands them the key. This is a quiet village where everyone knows each other, although Sylvain seems lost without a partner. The women, of course, are the centre of attention as Sylvain joins them on the beach, shows them how to fish, but is himself like a fish out of water.

Sylvain's attempts to hit it off with Patricia obviously aren't working, as proven by his aggression to the gendarme Gilles (Laurent Papot) who's taken her outside the disco for a snog against the wall. He's just one of nature's losers: how could he miss out on the signification the time Patricia sucked her finger when referring to Bill Clinton, for instance? Patricia, though, is really not interested in Gilles, not really interested in any man or woman sexually, she's just disillusioned by the whole thing.

However – and in a kind of reprise of the end of Brac's À l'abordage – and the viewer could see this coming by about the middle of the film – when Juliette comes to say goodbye to Sylvain the night before she and her mother are leaving she asks for his email address, eats strawberries with him and spends the night with him. She explains that her mother always goes for wrong type, the pushy ones, and it's clear that Juliette is more mature than her mother in a number of ways: the fact that Patricia wants to do a stupid multiple choice game in a magazine while Juliette's studying a book for college is just one of them. Refreshing, and of course Rohmerian at the same time.