by Nataliia Serebriakova
Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Melvil Poupaud, Chiara Mastroianni, Golshifteh Farahani
Intro:
… a warm, witty and perceptive French drama about love, responsibility, aging and the possibility of starting again.
Nicolas Pariser’s One Minute to Midnight, in the Venice Competition, is made in the finest tradition of French conversational drama: a film in which people walk, argue, flirt, remember, accuse and forgive, while seemingly casual exchanges gradually reveal entire lives. Blending comedy with melancholy and political observation, Pariser turns a seemingly simple family story into an intelligent and warmly human portrait of a man forced to reconsider the way that he has lived.
At the centre is 49-year-old Leonardo, played with understated charm and vulnerability by Melvil Poupaud. His life enters a period of uncertainty when he learns that his father has died. The news would be complicated enough, but Leonardo barely knew the man. He now discovers that this distant father was relatively wealthy — and that he has a sister, played by Chiara Mastroianni, whom he has never met. To settle the inheritance, Leonardo will eventually have to travel to Italy and meet her. Before that, however, he spends a week in Paris, moving through a city populated by the people who have shaped his adult life.
What follows is almost a retrospective of his romantic history — or, as Leonardo rather old-fashionedly calls it, a “revisit” of his love life. He meets former partners, friends and acquaintances, each encounter revealing something about the man he once was. Among them is a prominent politician whom Leonardo abandoned when she was still his intern, a decision that acquires a very different meaning years later. There is also Tina, played by Golshifteh Farahani, a weary middle-aged woman now working as a costume designer on a television series directed by one of their mutual friends. The series happens to be loosely based on their relationship, with a fictional character clearly resembling Leonardo. Discovering this version of himself becomes one of the film’s funniest and most uncomfortable surprises.
Pariser has a particular gift for keeping these encounters conversational without allowing them to become dramatically weightless. The film does not rely on conventional twists to sustain interest; its pleasure comes from watching people reveal themselves, often unintentionally, through what they say and what they leave unsaid. Their exchanges move between love, feminism, politics, infidelity, memory, morality and responsibility, while humour prevents the film from becoming overly solemn. There is something distinctly French about this confidence in dialogue — the belief that an apparently insignificant argument can suddenly expose an entire emotional history.
Leonardo’s teenage daughter adds another dimension. Politically engaged and influenced by socialist ideas and feminism, she is far less willing than her father to accept the moral compromises of his generation. Their encounters expose the distance between the principles Leonardo once embraced and the behaviour he now has to confront. He is never reduced to a stereotypical “bad man”: Pariser allows him to remain contradictory, charming, selfish, affectionate and occasionally blind to the consequences of his actions. That complexity makes his gradual reckoning all the more convincing.
The political dimension is never merely decorative. Paris is filled with demonstrations and unrest, creating the sense that the city itself is waiting for something to happen. The atmosphere has an almost apocalyptic quality, as though the characters are moving through the final moments before midnight. This gives the original French title, Un peu avant minuit [Shortly Before Midnight] its particular resonance. The approaching darkness is both collective and personal: outside, society appears increasingly unstable; inside Leonardo, an entire version of his life is beginning to fall apart.
This becomes especially meaningful when Leonardo finally meets the sister he never knew existed. After spending the film surrounded by people with whom he shares a complicated history, he encounters someone with whom he has no history at all.
Pariser handles these ideas with considerable lightness. Rather than turning Leonardo’s crisis into a heavy philosophical exercise, he surrounds it with jokes, awkward encounters, political arguments and the unpredictable energy of Paris. Melvil Poupaud is particularly well suited to this tone, allowing Leonardo’s charm to coexist with his flaws. The result is a film that is intellectually engaged without becoming pretentious and politically aware without sacrificing its human comedy — a warm, witty and perceptive French drama about love, responsibility, aging and the possibility of starting again.
