Week 7/2026

Whether you love it or loathe it, Valentine’s week brings a batch of love stories with it. As always, we offer three films that mark the occasion in their own way. We open the week with Certain Women (2016), screening as part of the Kelly Reichardt retrospective at Flagey, on the occasion of the Belgian release of her new film, The Mastermind. Set in the small towns and wide landscapes of Montana, the film follows the quiet lives of three women whose paths barely cross. Reichardt observes routine with patience: unlit roads, repetitive work, conversations that falter rather than resolve. In the final vignette, a ranch hand played by Lily Gladstone falls in love with Beth (Kristen Stewart), a young lawyer teaching a night class. She deviates subtly from her everyday life, opening a small fissure in the film’s careful order. Montana itself, with its mountains and plains, frames these lives marked by restraint, dignity and small, unspoken desires.

Monokino’s pick for Valentine’s Day is Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982), an adaptation of Jean Genet’s novel Querelle de Brest. The film presents a colourful port city, full of desire and ritualised violence. Homosexuality is linked to transgression without moral judgement, echoing Genet’s fascination with extremes. Fassbinder, however, does not offer transcendence: Querelle’s sculpted posture and deliberate control resist social pressure, but this resistance leads to solitude rather than liberation. As Oscar Wilde writes in The Ballad of Reading Gaol, “each man kills the thing he loves.” In Querelle, love, betrayal, and identity are intertwined.

The week closes with Agnès Varda’s Jacquot de Nantes, her tribute to her husband, Jacques Demy. The film depicts Demy’s childhood and early experiments with cinema, blending black-and-white images with bursts of colour. She uses clips from Demy’s films, while his occasional presence on screen adds quiet poignancy. Jacquot de Nantes is a personal farewell and a loving gesture from one artist to another.