DISCIPLINE | Omeleto

From the creator

A father slaps his child. One night in a convenience store in Lausanne, Switzerland, a father loses patience with his young daughter, Lola, who keeps trying to put a certain package of goodies into the basket. When he objects, she throws a fit and runs away, which escalates into a full-blown tantrum, complete with bystanders' broken jars and a slap. The slap draws the attention of other shoppers, one of which threatens to report the father for child abuse. Soon the incident becomes an argument, which draws in other people in the shop. One fight leads to another, and soon the whole thing blows up into a major outburst in the neighborhood. Writer-director Christophe M. Saber's sharp, witty short files itself under the category of comedy, but its humor isn't based on punchlines or pratfalls. Instead, it mines a certain vein of ironic social observation, capturing a pressure cooker of underlying societal and personal tensions that come boiling to the surface to unpredictable effect. The ensemble of characters is especially large for a short, and they all function less on the level of psychological depth and more as social types. The story doesn't get deep inside any one character's head, instead, focusing on the interactions between them. To this end, the acting overall is especially skilled, able to evoke the archetypes that make up this particular slice of Swiss society -- a harried father, a well-to-do wealthy couple, Arab immigrants, "native" Europeans -- while seeming

Published 2020-02-19 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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