Synopsis
Remi sells artificial grass. It is an apparently irrelevant detail, but in reality it is already a perfect philosophical statement: Remi lives in an artificial world and, consistently enough, has also acquired an artificial woman. After a romantic disappointment, he has decided to solve the problem of love once and for all by getting Audrey, an inflatable doll whom he affectionately calls “sweetheart.” A relationship finally free of conflicts, arguments, demands, autonomy, recriminations and, above all, that annoying characteristic real women have: being people.
Then Patricia arrives, a new colleague, a paragliding instructor, apparently allergic to children and decidedly uninterested in playing the role of decorative female. And just as Remi begins talking to Audrey about her, as though an inflatable doll were some kind of best friend with whom he could discuss the sexy colleague, the unthinkable happens: Audrey comes to life.
Review
9 min read
Reviewed by Beatrice
· 24. September 2026
If women were demanding about men’s character, they would never marry.
— George Bernard Shaw
— George Bernard Shaw
The interesting thing is that there is no explanation.
No cosmic radiation, no secret laboratory, no childhood trauma, no rogue artificial intelligence. Audrey simply wakes up.
Remi, naturally, reacts as any contemporary man would react when his ideal woman suddenly turns into a real woman: he reaches for a knife, calls customer service and basically asks whether the product can be returned.
It is difficult to imagine a more precise metaphor.
Sophie Beaulieu creates a fantasy comedy that has the intelligence not to explain the inexplicable. The doll comes to life. That’s it. The real mystery, if anything, is another one: why was Remi so convinced that a non-living woman was a better solution than a living one?
The answer is fairly simple: because a doll cannot disappoint.
A doll does not leave. She does not argue. She does not age. She does not make demands. She does not need to be understood. She does not ask a man to question his own inability to love. She simply remains there, available, eternally young and, above all, programmed for him.
The male paradise, in other words.
Until paradise starts talking.
Audrey tells him: “I’m the same as before, but alive. Brilliant, right?”
And this is where the film finds its cleverest idea: the perfect woman becomes imperfect precisely when she becomes a subject.
Remi then tries to bring some order to the chaos. He explains to Audrey that he cannot be with a woman because he would disappoint her, bore her, and besides, he is old. Audrey replies with disarming honesty: yes, she knows, but she is programmed to love him. It is her vocation.
Except that once vocation acquires consciousness, it very quickly begins to become a choice.
And this is where La Poupée starts having fun with one of the oldest patriarchal fantasies: a man wants a woman who loves him unconditionally; the ideal woman, however, would be even more ideal if she needed absolutely nothing from him.
Audrey, at least at first, seems perfect. She eats, cooks, waits for Remi, wants to meet his parents. But slowly she begins to produce an unforeseen inconvenience: subjectivity.
And subjectivity, by definition, is a pain in the ass.
One of the funniest moments comes when Audrey casually talks about diarrhea and Remi corrects her: women don’t talk about these things. Men can discuss such matters among themselves, but a woman must apparently maintain a superior level of biological decorum.
Audrey, who evidently never attended the training course entitled “How to Become a Proper Woman,” points out that this makes no sense.
Of course it doesn’t.
But this is precisely the film’s comic mechanism: Audrey is a woman born yesterday, and therefore she has not yet learned all the bullshit a woman is expected to learn over an entire lifetime.
She does not know that she has to be beautiful but not too vain. Young but not childish. Sexy but not vulgar. Available but not clingy. Well-groomed but apparently natural. Thin but not obsessed with her body. Aging, yes, but preferably without anyone noticing. Having desires, yes, but not too many. Having opinions, yes, but without compromising male serenity. And perhaps not wearing skirts that are too short, even if there are “men” who prefer them that way.
And above all: no diarrhea.
Audrey is not having it.
When she begins questioning wrinkles, aging, hair removal, make-up, hairdressers and the entire daily liturgy through which the female body is transformed into a permanent maintenance project, the film finds its most obvious target: a woman is never simply a woman; she must constantly be worked on, corrected, improved, packaged and returned to the market with the wrapping intact.
Audrey, after all, was already packaged.
The problem is that now she wants to get rid of the packaging.
And there is something perfectly surreal about the fact that it is precisely an inflatable doll who exposes the artificiality of femininity. It is the most constructed woman imaginable who discovers that she no longer wants to be constructed.
Meanwhile, Remi continues watching documentaries about the men who made History: Churchill, Mitterrand, great men, great wars, great strategies, great decisions made by very serious men while the planet merrily collapsed around them.
It is one of the film’s funniest details: while Audrey is trying to understand what it means to be a person, Remi watches the men who made History.
Because apparently History is still a men’s club with women barred from entry, except when they are required to be wives, mothers, lovers, victims or decoration.
And if Audrey wants to know what she can do with her life, the answer is nothing. She cannot do anything. She has no money: perhaps the film’s simplest and, at the same time, most political joke. Audrey was created to be desired, not to work, produce, choose, build a career or have an existential project of her own. She is a woman without a résumé.
A sort of millennia-old female condition condensed into an inflatable doll.
And then comes another delightful scene: the family.
Remi introduces Audrey to his parents and they are thrilled. His mother practically blesses the miracle: finally, a woman who might take care of her son. His sister, meanwhile, asks whether Remi has hired a Russian escort.
This is the moment when the family understands perfectly the role assigned to women: preferably wife, nurse, housekeeper, substitute mother and emotional accessory.
Audrey, however, introduces a small union-style amendment: I am not your mother, and above all, I am not willing to become one. Being your doll already is demanding enough.
The concept is devastating in its simplicity: a woman is not born to take care of a man simply because the man exists.It sounds obvious. And yet a little social history is enough to show how little obvious it actually is.
La Poupée does not, however, aspire to become a feminist treatise. And that is a good thing. Beaulieu prefers to stick the knife into patriarchy and then twist it with a certain degree of amusement.
She does not preach. She makes things happen, and the things are absurd enough to speak for themselves.
There is also a beautiful romantic short circuit. Remi begins, in fact, to fall in love with Patricia, the real woman, the one who works, speaks Arabic, teaches paragliding and has absolutely no intention of being a doll. And suddenly the problem is no longer Audrey.
The problem is Remi, because the doll was easy; the woman is not.
A woman can say no. She can have a job. She can be tired. She may not be in the mood. She can contradict him. She can be smarter than him. She can even ask him who he is.
And that is a much more dangerous question than it sounds.
Remi therefore has to confront the one thing from which he had carefully protected himself: reciprocity.
This is where the film, beneath its surface of absurd comedy, touches on a fairly serious existential question: loneliness does not arise only from the absence of the other. It can also arise from the desire to have the other without having to endure their otherness.
And Audrey progressively stops being the object of Remi’s desire and becomes the subject of her own desire. The transition is as simple as it is radical.
The doll wants to live. And living means, among other things, being able to be a pain in the ass.
The film finds its best humour precisely in the collision between the language of male desire and that of female autonomy. Remi keeps looking for a rational solution to a situation that is not rational. Audrey, meanwhile, gradually becomes acquainted with the wonderful irrationality of being alive.
Then comes the circle of women. Audrey spends a night with Remi’s sister and something happens, as though that weren’t enough…
Perhaps this is the device through which the film shows Remi a truth he could never have seen while watching an ordinary documentary about Churchill: the woman we imagine is almost always much simpler than the woman we actually encounter.
La Poupée is therefore a small fantasy comedy; its 80-minute running time also prevents it from inflating like its protagonist: it remains compact, absurd, often hilarious and sufficiently nasty toward its own characters that it never turns into a sermon. French critics have emphasized precisely this combination of comedy, fantasy and reflection on objectification and relations between men and women.
And Vincent Macaigne is perfect as always, and perfect for Remi too: a man perpetually astonished by his own existence, a kind of sentimental castaway who has built himself a plastic raft and then wonders when the raft starts talking to him.
Cécile de France, magnificent, takes Patricia to the opposite side of the device: the woman who is not there to complete the male, but simply because she exists.
And Zoé Marchal has the most delicate task: playing a doll who must learn to become a person without losing the awareness that she was conceived, literally, as an object.
Sophie Beaulieu’s idea is all here: the doll does not truly become human when she comes to life. She becomes human when she starts saying no.
And perhaps that is the oldest form of emancipation.
The rest is paragliding, artificial grass, Churchill, diarrhea, hairdressers, hair removal, delighted parents and men who continue to think they know what they want from women. Until a doll explains it to them, with a certain amount of patience, that once she comes to life, the real toy becomes the man.
Like in the cinema of Quentin Dupieux a film that takes its own absurdity seriously… and is all the more entertaining for it.
How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being?
— Oscar Wilde
— Oscar Wilde
