Avant / Après

To anyone who has lately travelled to Istanbul, it’s a familiar sight. Hordes of men strolling nonchalantly around the city’s tourist spots with their bare scalps stippled, bloodied and sometimes bandaged – survivors not of a recent zombie apocalypse but any of Turkey’s famously affordable hair transplant clinics. Each of these ruddy head wounds caps an individual story of insecurity and frail hope. Two of those are told, with tact and care, in Manoël Dupont’s delicate miniature BEFORE / AFTER, a film that treats the hair transplant industry with respectful, even journalistic interest, but not as the cure-all that the protagonists would like to believe it is. (Guy Lodge, Variety)