In her short film, Dufou captures an emotion only a woman who loves women can understand.
We’re left wanting to know more about them — yet somehow, we already do, because Dufou manages to say far more than what the eye alone can see.
Written by Giorgia Cattaneo
A hotel room, two women, and a forbidden love affair. Former lovers Lilia (Melany Kolmann) and Elena (Greta Guthauser) reunite to confront the most difficult choice of their lives: whether to keep their relationship a secret or let each other go forever. Elena dreams of escaping together and never looking back, longing for a life without compromise — even if it comes at a price. But Lilia hesitates: torn between resentment and fear, she is trapped between the safety of a marriage she doesn’t want and an authenticity she is not ready to embrace.
With a storytelling reminiscent of the emotional intimacy of Céline Sciamma and the visual melancholy of Wong Kar-wai, director Florencia Dufou turns the hotel room — familiar, yet suffocating, reflecting the contradiction of something that must hide to live — into a place of confession and constraint, where desire and guilt coexist. A love story suspended between passion and self-preservation, told by a gaze that never intrudes — it observes. In its graceful simplicity — every frame meticulously composed, every silence and dialogue meaningful — El Punto Cúlmine (eng. The Culminating Point) speaks of love and loss with disarming tenderness, mastering the art of saying everything that needs to be said in little more than twenty minutes. It’s not only about what is expressed out loud, but also about what remains unspoken — and it’s in that we understand it all most deeply.
“Does he really make you happy?” is what Elena asks Lilia after their night together at the hotel. He may have given her everything a woman could ever ask for, yet they both know “it’s not enough”. He is not enough, because no man can ever love a woman like a woman would. The inescapable ache of loving someone who refuses to face their own truth; the tragedy — the same one lesbian singer Chappell Roan voices in modern pop anthem Good Luck, Babe! — of a woman trying to live a life that isn’t hers, while the memory of the one who truly saw her keeps burning underneath.
The “culminating point” is not merely the breaking point of Elena and Lilia’s affair — it is the, however painful, moment of recognition that their love is real, and that its very realness makes it impossible to exist freely beyond the walls of that room. To name it would mean to live it, and to live it would mean to lose everything else. It’s the kind of moment Virginia Woolf called the revelation — that brief instant when the veil lifts and life is seen as it truly is.
In Mrs Dalloway — the book Elena is reading aloud to Lilia in a flashback, as they share a tender moment in bed —, Clarissa’s kiss with Sally is described as “a present, wrapped up […] a diamond, something infinitely precious” that makes the whole world disappear, yet Clarissa is told just to keep, not to look at. This is what Elena and Lilia are to each other: a gift they cannot unwrap, a truth they cannot live with. And yet, like Clarissa, they will carry the memory of that brief, most exquisite moment.
We’re left wanting to know more about them — yet somehow, we already do, because Dufou manages to say far more than what the eye alone can see.
Photo: IMDb
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