Paulina Is Leaving 1969

Paulina leaves the apartment she shares with her two brothers, Nicolas and Olivier, stepping into a world that feels increasingly unstable and unsettled, where every step seems to echo with unpredictability and danger. The departure is marked by chaotic and sometimes violent confrontations, a sense that the ordinary rhythm of life has fractured beneath the weight of unseen pressures.

In a nearby café, she encounters a mysterious stranger who works at a nearby psychiatric clinic. There, she is introduced by a nurse and asked to answer a questionnaire that she watches unfold on a cinema screen, the words printed on a purple background creating a strangely clinical yet poetic frame for her experience.

Meanwhile, a civil conflict appears to be raging around them, with checkpoints, distant gunfire, and the uneasy reappearance of Nicolas in chains. He is allowed to visit Paulina at the clinic but is carted off the next day as a deserter, after telling Paulina that Olivier has left for the forest to join a rebel group. The tension between personal loyalties and the larger political turmoil colors every encounter, casting a shadow over the clinic’s walls and the town’s streets.

Paulina’s fate becomes suddenly precarious when she is sold by the clinic to a brothel, which stands out as the town’s only functioning institution and the only extant building in sight. The establishment is presided over by Hortense, Hortense, a former opera singer, and the Old Uncle, whose endless philosophizing fills a room dominated by a massive globe of the world. Hortense urges Paulina to participate in a cocktail party that she refuses, resisting the social ritual that the brothel embodies even as her surroundings push her toward it.

Within the ruined town, Paulina crosses paths with Nicolas again, only to find herself unsettled as she searches for Hortense once more. A mysterious man appears, driving her away through the forest, and the sense of being pursued—emotionally and physically—persists as the narrative threads weave through a landscape scarred by conflict and decay.

The film’s mood blends stark realism with dreamlike textures, creating a portrait of individuals negotiating identity and power amid upheaval. It remains a spare, measured study of how personal choices unfold under pressure, where institutions that once seemed stable crumble, and where fragile human connections are tested by the sounds of gunfire, the pull of loyalty, and the lure of escape.