Let Them Eat Steak
AI Film I Music
Circa 2026
On a Parisian housing estate, the words Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité bleed red across a concrete wall. A mother and child pass with a shopping trolley. Families eat, converse and watch television, their ordinary routines undisturbed by the extraordinary events unfolding elsewhere. On the screen, news bulletins announce that the bourgeoisie have taken to the streets. The familiar architecture of civil unrest has been inverted. Those historically imagined as the agents of disorder have become its spectators, while those accustomed to observing history from a position of comfort now appear determined to tear it apart. Yet there is something unsettling about the tranquillity of the estate. The distance between catastrophe and domestic life is measured not in miles, but in the thickness of a television screen.
As the film crosses that threshold, Paris becomes a theatre of magnificent absurdity. Powdered wigs rise above clouds of smoke. Aristocrats charge through burning streets, their elaborate costumes lending the violence the appearance of an extravagant historical pageant. At enormous tables, the privileged devour their meals with an almost religious devotion. One corpulent gentleman, resplendent in gold, smiles over his steak as though appetite itself were a constitutional right. Elsewhere, a cartoon president smokes his cigar against the glow of a burning city. The comedy is savage, but never entirely comfortable. The distinction between revolutionary fervour and aristocratic excess begins to dissolve. Both possess an appetite for spectacle, for recognition, for the intoxicating possibility of becoming history rather than merely enduring it.
Visually, *Let Them Eat Steak* possesses an extraordinary, almost hallucinatory authority. Its drained blue-grey Paris is a city suspended between documentary evidence and collective nightmare, interrupted by the warmth of flames, gilded interiors and fleeting human expressions. The photography has the unsettling beauty of an image recovered from a future that has already disappeared. Its AI imagery feels less like invention than memory: fragments of an impossible past that nevertheless seem strangely familiar. Faces emerge with the conviction of historical portraits, while streets and interiors acquire the gravity of places we believe we have visited. The film's greatest visual achievement lies in making the ridiculous appear monumental and the monumental profoundly ridiculous.
The music gives this unstable universe its heartbeat. Its insistent rhythm transforms laughter, gluttony and destruction into a single choreography, collapsing the distinction between celebration and catastrophe. What begins as satire gradually acquires the character of a collective ritual. In the final image, a colossal screaming aristocrat towers above a multitude of climbing silhouettes. Are they bringing the monument down, or ascending towards something they secretly wish to become? The film refuses to decide. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of power is not that we despise those who possess it, but that we remain so endlessly fascinated by their lives. And somewhere, beyond the flames and the music, a family continues watching television, while history struggles to remember which side of the screen it belongs to.
