HIGHTECH-COMPUTER GADGETS MORE THAN TECHNOLOGY

Hailed by The New York Press as arguably the best French film of the last decade, La Sentinelle is a surreal psychological thriller about the legacy of the Cold War as the film follows the present day travails of a young medical student. Mathias Barillet (Emmanuel Salinger) is the twenty five-year-old son of a diplomat who is studying medicine in Germany, where his father is assigned. Mathias decides to move to Paris to escape the boredom of Aix-la-Chapelle and travels by train where he meets a man who threatens him, insults him and then disappears. The following day, he discovers a shrunken human head in his bag. Mathias is scared, disgusted and later fascinated by this fragment of human remains. At the school lab, Mathias tries to discover the origins of the head. Little by little, he becomes obsessed by it, to the point of wanting to save the death of the corpse like one says save the life of a wounded person. This obsession isolates him more and more from his surroundings.