Elisa Baudoin Turns a Paris Betting Bar Into Her Playground in "PMU WHAT?"

REVERSE director Elisa Baudoin has released "PMU WHAT?", a creative short she wrote and directed in Paris.

In France, the PMU is a fixture of neighborhood life: a corner café licensed to take bets on horse racing, where regulars pick up cigarettes and scratch cards, keep one eye on the races playing above the bar, and order a beer well before noon. It runs on rituals and routines, and it is overwhelmingly male.

Elisa Baudoin has fun with every one of those tropes. In "PMU WHAT?", four women walk into this frozen-in-time setting and, at first, look completely out of place. Then it becomes clear they belong there. Sensual, nonchalant, and unapologetic, they make no effort to blend in or be accepted. They dance on the tables, sprawl across the counter, and slowly become the center of gravity of the room, while the regulars keep betting, pouring, and reading the racing pages as if nothing were happening.

"With this film, I really wanted to put two worlds that seem to have nothing in common in the same room. These women aren't looking for a place in this masculine world; they turn it into their playground. There's an instinctive kind of feminism in that, a way of reversing the gaze and the balance of power without ever needing to proclaim it. And around them, nothing changes. Bets are placed and drinks are poured. That's exactly where something starts to shift," explains Elisa Baudoin.

That tension between the real and the surreal is built into the craft. Shot on 16mm with director of photography James Coote, the film continues the mixed-media approach Baudoin developed on her video for Maëlle's "Tic tac". The real bar, with its zinc counter, espresso cups, and regulars, collides with worlds built in post: the women strut between harness racers on the track, pose against walls of Gauloises and Gitanes cigarette packs, lounge in a sea of scratch cards, and hold up an oversized Lottery check for 69 million euros, while a racehorse, seamlessly composited, stands at the bar. Styling by Agathe Auriffeille and set design by Arthur Deshayes push the contrast between high fashion and the worn textures of the PMU, until the familiar starts to feel strange.

"Elisa keeps refining her language from one project to the next, and with 'PMU WHAT?' you can see a singular vision coming fully into focus. It's deeply photographic, obsessive about craft, and bold without ever forcing it. It's a cool, confident film that looks like no one else's," says Thibaut Estellon, Founder/EP at REVERSE.