I Love Peru

If you haven't yet been hit by the Raphaël Quenard freight train, I Love Peru is either the perfect introduction or a very confusing restraining order. Quenard has spent the last two years becoming the most inescapable face in French cinema, possessing a jittery, motormouth energy that suggests he’s had four espressos and just witnessed a minor car accident. In this 69-minute oddity, he isn't just the star; he is the director, the writer, the producer, and presumably the guy making the sandwiches on set. It is a film that feels less like a traditional narrative and more like the cinematic equivalent of a frantic voice memo sent by a friend at 3:00 AM.

I watched this on my laptop while my neighbor was loudly practicing the tuba, and the discordant honking from next door somehow synced up perfectly with the chaotic energy of the first twenty minutes.

The Quenard Hurricane

The film opens with a version of Raphaël that isn't far from his public persona: a rising actor caught in the gears of his own sudden fame. The first act is a dizzying, meta-textual blur where Jean-Pascal Zadi and Michel Hazanavicius appear as themselves, acting as anchors to a reality that Raphaël is rapidly drifting away from. It captures a very specific 2020s anxiety—the feeling that success is just a different kind of trap.

Quenard plays "Raphaël" with a frantic, sweating desperation that makes you want to open a window. He’s abandoning his friends, including a wonderfully grounded Hugo David (who also co-directs), in a pursuit of "success" that he can’t quite define. When the "disturbing vision" mentioned in the synopsis finally hits, it isn't some grand CGI spectacle. It’s internal, messy, and absurd. It’s the moment the mask slips, and the actor realizes he has no idea who is underneath the performance.

A Quest for the "Condor"

Once the action shifts to Peru, the film sheds its industry-satire skin and becomes a lo-fi spiritual odyssey. This is where the movie gets truly weird. We’re introduced to José Garcia as "The Condor," a role that requires Garcia to balance on the razor's edge between mystical guide and total lunatic. Garcia is a legend of French comedy, and seeing him play against Quenard is like watching two different eras of chaotic energy collide in the middle of the Andes.

The cinematography by Hugo David is remarkably tactile for such a short film. It avoids the glossy, National Geographic "travel porn" look that usually plagues Western films set in South America. Instead, Peru feels dusty, confusing, and slightly indifferent to Raphaël’s spiritual crisis. The film suggests that self-indulgence as an art form is a luxury the rest of the world doesn't really have time for. There’s a scene involving a ritual that I’m still not sure was meant to be moving or a punchline, which is exactly where this movie likes to live.

The 69-Minute Sprint

The most controversial thing about I Love Peru isn't the content, but the runtime. At 69 minutes, it’s a "tweener"—too long for a short, too short for a standard theatrical release. In our current era of three-hour franchise epics and algorithm-driven streaming "content," this brevity feels like a revolutionary act of mercy. It doesn't overstay its welcome because it barely has time to take its shoes off.

It’s an obscure entry in the 2025 landscape because it defies the current "content" model. It wasn't designed to be a "four-quadrant hit" or a "prestige awards contender." It’s a DIY project that somehow got a budget, a weird little artifact from a time when French indie cinema was trying to figure out how to be funny without being trite. Anaïde Rozam provides a necessary breath of fresh air as Anaïde, acting as the audience surrogate who looks at the unfolding madness with a "is he serious?" expression that I found myself mimicking more than once.

Ultimately, I Love Peru is a fascinating portrait of a performer trying to outrun his own shadow. It’s messy, occasionally self-important, and deeply eccentric, but it’s never boring. Whether you find Quenard’s brand of high-octane rambling charming or exhausting will dictate your enjoyment, but you have to admire the sheer audacity of a film this short and this strange getting a release at all. It’s a minor key spiritual journey that reminds us that sometimes, the best way to find yourself is to get lost in a country where nobody cares about your IMDb page.