A General Disappointment offers an existential meditation in three chapters based on a text combined with a series of long static shots. These depict director Serge Garcia in everyday situations that distill a depressive burlesque, where the banal turns to absurdity and weighs down the solitary body of the character. In counterpoint to this ordinary and silent daily life, the text appears as a subtitle, an inner voice that recalls, through the narration of comical anecdotes, the caustic excesses of a Woody Allen or a Larry David. The simplicity of the logorrheic device of A General Disappointment is matched only by its marvelous precision and reflective density. After Grand Central Hotel (FID 2021), Serge Garcia once again constructs a cinematic object in the service of discourse, and finds in the care of framing and the bet on their duration the springs to bring literature – his own and that of, among others, Kathryn Scanlan – and philosophical thought – Lauren Berlant. While Serge Garcia, sitting at the wheel of a stopped car, shovels into himself a plate of noodles worthy of the most gloomy hours of a cop on stakeout in a bad thriller, the text invites reflection on the organized failures of capitalist societies and the vanity of their promises of happiness and self-fulfillment. The sketches go back and forth from the street to the bedroom, a movement reaffirming the intimate as political and the necessary analysis of our most personal affects (feelings of inadequacy, frustrations, neuroses) as produced and standardized. Over a close-up of an amp, the voice of Laurene LaVallis, a short-lived singer from the 80s, reverses the process of concentration, from reading to full listening, as a possibility of reappropriating a body in the present. Without ostentation, Serge Garcia simply creates a presence in the world and in oneself.