--- title: "A World Without Women" year: 2012 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/a-world-without-women" fi1m_id: "a-world-without-women" imdb_id: "tt1858582" tmdb_id: 170832 wikidata_id: "Q3548845" fi1m_score: 80 critics_reviews: 1 published: "2026-09-22T14:42:22.385225+00:00" updated: "2026-09-22T14:42:22.877731+00:00" region: "FI" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # A World Without Women (2012) Directed by Guillaume Brac · 58m · Comedy, Drama ## Identity A World Without Women - **Canonical:** https://film.one/film/a-world-without-women - **Type:** Film - **Fi1m ID:** a-world-without-women - **IMDb ID:** tt1858582 - **TMDB ID:** 170832 - **Wikidata ID:** Q3548845 - **Same entity:** https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1858582/, https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/170832, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3548845 **Fi1m score: 80** · Critics: 1 of 6 reviews so far *In a sentence:* A lonely man hands two women the keys to a flat and then cannot find his way out of their holiday > Guillaume Brac’s hour-long comedy about a shy man, a seaside town after the season and a mother and daughter who are kind to him is small, funny and unexpectedly tender. It is slight by design, and once or twice it likes its hero more than it should. ## Synopsis Ault, a resort on the Picardy coast, at the end of summer. Sylvain (Vincent Macaigne), a heavy, shy man who lets holiday flats, hands the keys to Patricia (Laure Calamy) and her teenage daughter Juliette (Constance Rousseau), here for a few days. He carries their bags up and finds it hard to leave. Afterwards he keeps turning up: on the beach, at the market, outside their door with an invitation rehearsed too often. His friend Gilles (Laurent Papot), easy with women as Sylvain is not, is drawn in. A night at the local club rounds off the week. ## Review Guillaume Brac’s film runs 58 minutes, which makes it either a long short or a very short feature, and it does not much care which. It is set in Ault, a small resort on the Picardy coast, at the point in late summer when the town starts to empty, and its hero is Sylvain (Vincent Macaigne), who lets holiday flats and has too little to do. Into one of them arrive Patricia (Laure Calamy) and her teenage daughter Juliette (Constance Rousseau), down for a few days by the sea. Sylvain hands over the keys and then finds reasons to stay. That is the whole film. It is small, funny and kind, and we liked it a great deal. Macaigne is the reason it works. Sylvain is bearded, balding and heavy, with a laugh that arrives a second before anything is funny, and he speaks in sentences that trail off into apologies. He is the sort of man who rehearses a casual remark for ten minutes and then delivers it too loudly. Macaigne never asks us to feel sorry for him, and so we did. We laughed at him the first few times, and then, watching him hover on the beach a few yards from the two women, dressed for a different season and pretending to look at the sea, we stopped laughing and felt something closer to recognition. Most of us have been that man for an afternoon. Sylvain is him for life. Calamy plays Patricia as a woman who flirts out of habit and kindness in roughly equal parts, and who notices Sylvain’s devotion without quite knowing what to do with it. Rousseau’s Juliette watches everyone, says little and misses nothing. Laurent Papot’s Gilles is the film’s cleverest piece of casting: good-looking, comfortable in a room full of strangers, everything Sylvain is not. Brac and his co-writer Hélène Ruault put the two friends side by side and never once make Gilles the villain. He is simply the man women look at, and he knows it, and he is not unkind about it, which is worse. Tom Harari shoots the town in flat grey Channel light, the chalk cliffs pale behind the beach and the streets quiet enough that a passing car counts as an event. There is no attempt to make Ault pretty, and it becomes rather lovely as a result. Harari also supplies the music, and uses almost none of it; most scenes play to wind and gulls and the scrape of a chair. Damien Maestraggi cuts patiently. When a conversation goes wrong, the camera stays for the silence afterwards rather than rescuing anyone, and the film’s best jokes live in those extra seconds. A night at the local club, past Eric Hannier’s bouncer and into a room where everyone is twenty years younger than Sylvain, is staged as gently as it could be and is still hard to watch. The flaws are the flaws of scale. An hour is enough for Sylvain but not for anyone else; Patricia gets one good scene of her own and Juliette is a sketch, alert and unfinished. The young men working the beach (Terry Fouache, Geoffrey Boulanger and Cédric Cailleux, credited as beach chat-up artists) are there to show us what confidence looks like from the outside, and they do that and nothing more. And Brac’s affection for Sylvain, which is the film’s great strength, occasionally tips into indulgence: there are moments where the script lets him off a hook a sharper film would have left him on. The title, meanwhile, promises an argument about men and women. It is a joke about one man’s week, and a good one, but readers expecting a thesis should lower their sights. Brac had already tried Sylvain out in an earlier short, *Le Naufragé*, and this is the fuller portrait. Set against the long French tradition of holiday films in which people talk beautifully about their feelings, it is notable for how badly its people talk. Nobody here can say what they mean. That is the comedy and, by the end, the sadness, and Brac trusts us to find both without help. Watch it on a grey evening at the end of a holiday you did not quite enjoy. It is over before the kettle has boiled twice, and it will stay with you longer than most films twice its length. *Fi1m score 80, published 22 September 2026.* ## Straight answers **Is A World Without Women worth watching?** *A World Without Women* is worth watching for anyone who likes small, sad French comedies about people who cannot say what they mean, and we scored it 80. It runs 58 minutes, and Vincent Macaigne's shy, hovering Sylvain is the whole show. It is slight by design, and Guillaume Brac occasionally lets his hero off hooks a sharper film would have kept him on. **How long is A World Without Women, and what is it rated?** *A World Without Women* runs 58m. It is a comedy and drama film. **Where can I watch A World Without Women in Finland?** *A World Without Women* is available to buy from Apple TV from €1.99. Availability is checked daily; the links above go straight to each service. **How does A World Without Women compare to Tonnerre?** *A World Without Women* is the lighter and tighter of Guillaume Brac's two films with Vincent Macaigne, an hour-long late-summer comedy against [*Tonnerre*](https://film.one/film/tonnerre)'s longer, darker winter drama. The shorter film is the more consistent; *Tonnerre* is stronger in its first half and then turns into a different film about the same man. Start with the seaside one if you want to laugh, the snowbound one if you want Macaigne at his most unsettling. **What should I watch after A World Without Women?** After *A World Without Women*, try [*Tonnerre*](https://film.one/film/tonnerre) (2013, Fi1m 66): Brac and Macaigne again, longer and darker, in a small town in winter. Then [*Local Hero*](https://film.one/film/local-hero) (1983, Fi1m 86): A Scottish seaside village works its slow charm on a man who arrived with other plans. ### Reviews we read (1) - **The New Yorker**, Richard Brody (82/100, inferred): The critic praises Brac's bittersweet, delicately observed comedies for enshrining the lovable loser protagonist Sylvain in cinema's gallery of such characters. Brac's restrained humor and quiet empathy are highlighted as strengths, woven from traditions, customs, and the influence of landscape and weather. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/movies/a-world-without-women) ## Details - **Director:** Guillaume Brac - **Director:** Guillaume Brac - **Writer:** Hélène Ruault, Guillaume Brac - **Cinematography:** Tom Harari - **Editor:** Damien Maestraggi - **Music:** Tom Harari - **Producer:** Guillaume Brac, Maya Haffar, Nicholas Nonon - **Cast:** Vincent Macaigne as Sylvain; Laure Calamy as Patricia; Constance Rousseau as Juliette; Laurent Papot as Gilles; Terry Fouache as Dragueur Plage 1; Geoffrey Boulanger as Dragueur Plage 2; Cédric Cailleux as Dragueur Plage 2; Marie Picard as Marie - **Runtime:** 58m - **First release (France):** 7 April 2011 - **Genres:** Comedy, Drama ## Where to watch in Finland - Apple TV: buy €1.99, sd *Checked 2026-09-22.* Also available in: BE, CH, DE, DK, ES, FI, FR, GB, IT, NL, NO, SE, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## If you liked this - *Le Rayon vert* (1986): Rohmer’s lonely woman on a French summer holiday, talking herself into and out of hope - *Marty* (1955): A heavy, kind Bronx butcher who has given up on women; the original lovable loser - *Mid-August Lunch* (2008): A Roman bachelor, four old ladies and one hot weekend; tiny, warm and exact - *Tonnerre* (2013), Fi1m 66: Brac and Macaigne again, longer and darker, in a small town in winter — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/tonnerre.md) - *Local Hero* (1983), Fi1m 86: A Scottish seaside village works its slow charm on a man who arrived with other plans — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/local-hero.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/a-world-without-women